


Nearly Anyone Can Stand Adversity

by Actually_Felicity_Smoak



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Diary/Journal, Gen, I will tell you which chapters to skip for those, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Major Original Character(s), Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, POV Original Character, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, other tagged triggers are not 'on screen' but are discussed, suicidal thoughts is shown 'on screen'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2020-11-07 13:35:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 62
Words: 24,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20818133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Actually_Felicity_Smoak/pseuds/Actually_Felicity_Smoak
Summary: Based on this Tumblr Prompt:https://rainaramsay.tumblr.com/post/170248348195/recovering-superheroes"Give me some superheroes that are still recovering from what gave them powers in the first place, or the consequences. Give me superheroes without wide eyes and bright faces, but superheroes who know just how dangerous they can be.Give me a pyrokinetic kid who burnt something important to him and has to learn to ignore the memories that flow back whenever his hands light up."





	1. Chapter 1

**23 May  
**   
You know what they don't tell you about being a mutant?

It  _ hurts _

Not the emotional pain -- the loneliness, the rejection by (guaranteed) at least some of your family or close friends, the inability to talk about what's happening to you, the lack of people who understand. I mean, that's all real, and extremely painful. But also, people talk about that. We've got mutant pride, we've got little documentaries where people discuss their Mutant Hardships, we've got the bloggers talking about their day-to-day lives as mutants, and that's going to include some awkward-Thanksgiving-dinner stuff.

But even there, no one talks about the physical pain. It's like some big secret, even in the mutant community. Or maybe I'm the only one? Maybe no one else went through this? This can't be unique to me. Your cells are literally rearranging themselves. We're doing things humans were never designed to do. Of course it hurts. Of course.

That's what I tell myself. It's the only way I can think to make it through. But I don't know. Actually. 

No one does. What's normal? What's expected? No one knows. I can search the internet all I want -- I use porn mode more for covert mutant biology research than I do for actual porn -- but the fact of the matter is that no one knows. There aren't enough studies, because apparently no one can handle the concept of studying mutants without fucking dissecting us. Or torturing us. And then guess what? No one signs up for the studies, and then no one knows what's normal. And then you've got 17-year-olds on their phones under the covers at night, trying to figure out what's happening. Trying to guess whether it's safe to take ibuprofen, or if you’d better stick with ice. Trying to figure out whether you can live another day with the pain, or if this is going to be the day you have to go see a doctor, who will sit your parents down in their office with a serious expression, and change your entire life forever.

But every morning you remind yourself that it almost certainly doesn't matter, because your family doctor almost certainly knows less about mutant development than you do. You'd be turning your life upside-down, risking your safety for nothing. They wouldn't be able to actually help you, so you shoulder your backpack, hide your wince, and hope that it's not actually going to kill you.

It's got to be normal. It's got to be. Right?


	2. Chapter 2

**July 24th** **  
** **New York City**

SINKHOLE ON 49TH CAUSED BY ABANDONED SUBWAY TUNNEL COLLAPSE

The headline caused all the normal conversations any event does. People discussed it in coffee shops, around break-room coolers. Subway riders switched to ridesharing for a few days, or didn't, depending on what they could afford. Politicians denounced poor infrastructure maintenance, or the municipalization of infrastructure maintenance, or the city's homeless, or lack of homeless shelters, according to their standard public position on such things.

No one in the city really thought anything of it; in a city of 9 million people, with an average of three deaths per day simply due to traffic congestion, it qualified as an everyday occurrence. The sidewalk was cordoned off, the rubble was shifted, the injured were taken to hospitals, and property owners began the lengthy negotiation between business and insurance companies and the city planners to determine who ought to pay for the repairs.

Upstate, a conference was held in an old-money mansion-turned-school. It might have been an accident, certainly. But those tunnels had held for more than a century, and no others had collapsed. It was suspicious enough, they agreed, to warrant at least a quick investigation.


	3. Chapter 3

**25 July**

Hey, look, I have a desk again, and a place it's safe to pull out my journal. Yay....

God, how am I even going to go about summarizing everything that's happened in the last.... two and a half months?

You know what? I'm not even going to try. I'll just start with yesterday.

No, there's no chance I will ever forget yesterday. I don't need to record it. I'll start with today. It was... it was early this morning, actually, once the dust settled. Everyone got taken to a hospital. They asked about my parents, but I told them I was 18, which is almost true, and the clerk looked me up and down and said “emancipated?” and I said yes, which  _ is _ true, and she nodded and skipped over a lot of pages of the paperwork. I was fed, and got put in a room, and was allowed to sleep on a bed in a heated building, and that was good enough at the time. 

Woke up around 10:00. Wasn't sure what was going to happen, but I figured the less noise I made, the less likely I was to attract attention, and the longer I'd be allowed to stay. No one came by, and I was able to make it to the bathroom and shower without anyone taking any notice of me. I couldn’t figure out how to get food without attracting attention, but since the hospital was heated that didn’t matter so much. 

Around 13:00, a nurse opened the door and pointed at me. The woman looking over his shoulder had red hair and glasses, and was dressed in a business suit. She thanked the nurse, and he nodded and walked off. 

She introduced herself as Jean Grey, and asked what happened, yesterday, whether I'd been at the site of the cave-in. I asked if she was some kind of therapist, and she said no, she was here to evaluate me, and how had the cave-in happened? And I asked if she was with the police, and was I being detained, and she said no, she was here to invite me to a school. Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youngsters. Which sounds like a name for a sanitarium if I ever heard one, and I asked what kind of "gifted" they cater to. 

She turned and looked at the door, and it closed all by itself, and suddenly it all clicked in my head -- what "gifted" was a euphemism for, and why she kept asking me questions but didn't care if I answered them, and why she was interested in how the cave-in occurred. So I thought "Are you a telepath?" as hard as I could, and she winced and said not to  _ do  _ that, that my thoughts were more than loud enough without trying, thank you very much. And I apologized, and she said it was OK. 

So the long and the short of it is that while none of NYC's emergency responders saw anything unusual about century-old tunnels collapsing, the local mutant crew scans the news for signs of mutants in trouble, and thought it was suspicious enough to check out. So Ms. Grey drove down from their school, and asked to speak to the people who'd been injured, and pinpointed me as the mutant by asking the same questions she asked anyone, and listening in on my thoughts in response to the questions. 

The school is affiliated with the X-men, which while not the largest most powerful mutant group out there, does have a good reputation for minimizing collateral damage and for taking care of their people. Ms. Grey says I don't have to join the X-men to attend. It's an accredited boarding school; I'll get a diploma and college recommendation letters. And for the next year anyway, I'll have shelter and food and heat I don't have to make myself.  Homeless teens have 10x the mortality rate compared to non-homeless peers, and we have more than enough evidence that I don’t have what it takes to survive on my own. 

Honestly, even if I do have to enlist with X-men for a while, it's a better deal than the military, which is currently my other option for getting an education. The only resources I have are my intelligence and my research capability; to use those to  _ keep _ myself non-homeless, I need a college degree. I've gotta do whatever it takes to make that happen.

And if it's too bad, I can always run away again. At least I’ll have some time with heat, and food, before I do. 


	4. Chapter 4

**2 August**

Everyone here is so  _ impressed _ with my powers.

Did you know that concrete loses 80% of its compressive strength at temperatures above 800C? Not many people do. They're just impressed that I can "burn" concrete. "Oh, that's so cool!" they say. "Oh you must be so strong!" they say.

No one thinks about the consequences of it. Of the implications. I can output 9.6  _ billion  _ joules of energy. It takes about 2000 Joules to light a piece of paper on fire. And yeah, that sounds like a lot, and yeah, it kinda is, but it's .00002% of my maximum capacity. It's like if you could cause damage to things -- actually destroy objects around you -- with the strength it takes to lift 4% of an ounce. Or if you hurt things any time you moved faster than a quarter of an inch per hour.

Do you know how much energy human skin can absorb before it experiences cellular damage? I do.

I mean, Rogue's power sucks, I'm not trying to claim I've got the worst scenario here or anything. But she can wear gloves and play foosball with her friends. I just burn through the gloves. (Cotton starts to decompose when the surface temperature reaches just under 100C.)

And yes, I can control it if I pay attention. Which puts me in a much better position than a lot of kids here. Or even some of the adults. Mr. Summers has to sleep with his visor on, which just sounds... painful. If I'm careful, and paying very strict attention, and have myself locked down very thoroughly, I should be able to kiss someone some day.

It's just hard, you know? All day, every day, knowing that a moment of inattention is going to cause a problem somewhere between property damage and lethal damage.


	5. Chapter 5

**13 August**

Y'know what kinda sucks about sleeping in a mansion full of semi-trained mutants? No privacy. 

I mean, as someone who scorched the corner of the library table this morning, I totally recognize that I have no room to criticize someone for not having control of their powers. Like it's hard, and I get it, I do. I just...

Anyway, Betsy overheard me thinking last night, and she was worried and went to Ms Grey, and  _ she _ went to Professor X, and now I'm in mandatory counseling twice a week. Which is... not as bad as it sounds, honestly. The thing is, these people are not my parents, and -- more importantly -- they're not gonna  _ talk  _ to my parents. (I mean the teachers back at my old school weren't my parents either, but boy did that not make it OK to talk freely in front of them.)

Prof X was pretty cool about it, actually. I mean, unbelievably _not _distressed about the fact that someone in his house is fantasizing about burning down the whole damned city. And also, just, astonishingly willing to believe me when I said I wasn't actually  _ gonna _ . I don't really want to hurt anyone. I really don't. I just.

I don't even know. Maybe if I could explain it to someone, I wouldn't be in this situation. I don't want to hurt anyone, except when I do. Maybe it's just that I  _ want  _ to want to not hurt anyone, except I actually really don't. 

Anyway, Prof X just kinda looked at me, and listened. Which, really was just, super-surprising, I guess. I'm not used to anyone asking questions that they want answers to. Not real answers, anyway. I was just waiting for him to tell me what he wanted to hear, and he kinda winced and told me that he wanted an actual honest answer. 

And I don't know. I know I shouldn't have. But sometimes I just get those moods, where I just don't fucking care anymore, and it's not like they were gonna let me stay anyway, right? Not with what Betsy reported. So I did. I gave him everything, no holds barred. Just ranted at him for, like, I don't know, God, like fifteen minutes? Twenty? 

And then I waited to see if I’d be allowed to pack my things, or if he’d just tell me to get out, but he only muttered something about Erik, and told me I'd have to talk to a counselor. Which, I mean, yeah, not great. But it beats the hell out of homelessness. So yay?


	6. Chapter 6

**3 September**

It's been like 3 weeks, and I finally got my first superpower lesson. Mr. Summers took me down to the training rooms -- I guess the students don't have access on our own, in case we ... I don't know? Decide to over-train? I mean, I totally understand how a lot of our powers can be dangerous, but we're dangerous just out walking around. You'd think, if anything, they'd be reluctant to let us  _ out _ of the training rooms. 

The "danger room" is supposed to be hardened against any kind of damage any mutant can do. At least that's what Mr. Summers says. Today was mostly orientation: how it works, what training will look like, stuff like that. So we didn't have to test his assertion that there's nothing I can do to damage the structure of the training room. But honestly, what are they going to do if they're wrong? Why do you put it in the basement? If I dissolve the foundation of this place, like I did with my parents' house, it's gonna hurt a lot more people.

I'd like to imagine that they've thought of that, but they're so damn  _ chill _ about it, I can't really imagine that they have. If they really had an understanding of what would happen when the danger room collapsed -- if they really had an understanding of how likely that is given our abilities -- they'd be much more freaked out. Which means they're not thinking about it, which means I have to.

I suppose this is the kind of thing they'd like me to bring up in my counseling session tomorrow, but what good's that going to do? Ms. Keo will say, "Oh no, I'm sure it will be fine," but she won't provide any actual evidence, so what good are the reassurances? It's tiresome and exhausting, pretending to be mollified by meaningless platitudes.


	7. Chapter 7

**11 September**

It's the moment I've been dreading since I came here. Tomorrow is the first training session where I have to actually use my powers. I passed all the safety procedure tests, and so now it's time to do unsafe things.

But I did bring up the whole thing with the therapist, about whether it would even be safe to have me in the danger room. And of course she starts off with the whole "Oh no, I'm sure it will be fine!" schtick, and I'm just hunkered down in my chair getting ready to spend an hour trying not to roll my eyes, because I'm here to show how cooperative and pro-social I can be, because, y'know, 10x mortality rate.

And then she says, "-- but if you're worried about it, I can put you in contact with the engineer that built it."

And I was like, "... what?" 

But yeah, apparently this is not just your average gymnasium, built by the lowest bidder. It was designed by Dr. Henry Philip McCoy, who is a licensed civil engineer, as well as a medical doctor, and an expert in mutant biology. Ms. Keo set up a call, and I have an hour with him, 2300 GMT, a week from Saturday. 

So only one lesson between now and then. And if the thing was built by an actual engineer, it should have the proper safety margins. Mr. Summers can put out 2 gigawatts, which is not what I turn out, but it is in the right order of magnitude. If Dr. McCoy has done his work properly -- and from the papers I've read, it seems likely that he has -- then it should be able to stand up to an order of magnitude more than that, because this is definitely a high-stress/high risk application. Which means I should be safe. And anyway, Mr. Summers puts that energy into a much smaller area, so the thermal effects on the concrete should be comparable or higher than what I can do. If I don't see spots on the wall from his shots, then I should be fine. And honestly even then, as long as I can do anything other than max output (and I haven't burned down any drywall-and-2x4 structures since I got here), I should be fine.


	8. Chapter 8

**12 September**

I'm a failure.

Mr. Summers set up a target -- just a disposable paper one, about a meter on a side. He just wanted to see how much directional control I have over the energy output which, like, makes sense. There are a lot of parameters I need to be able to control, and that's definitely one of them. But I just...

I couldn't do it. All these months of holding myself in, trying to keep myself from injuring anything. All those calculations to make sure I couldn't send the danger room up in smoke. And when I'm finally allowed to let go, there's no fireball; not a flame, not a  _ spark _ .

Am I a fraud? Did I somehow convince them I have mutant powers when I don't? But the scorch mark is still on the library table -- I went and checked. And the record of my parents' house burning down is in the police blotters. But if I'm a mutant then why couldn't I burn the target? A single piece of paper. OK, a square meter of paper, but still. 24,000 Joules, and that's to ignite the whole thing at once. There's no way I couldn't get  _ anything  _ to burn. But the damn target wasn't even warm.

I don't understand. I don't know what to do. Bad enough they've got someone who wants to burn things. It's a school for mutants. They're not gonna let me stay if I'm not one.


	9. Chapter 9

**13 September**

OK, so, you know what's awesome about living in a mansion full of mutants, of any training level? I am finally surrounded by people who know mutant biology better than I do.

You know what sucks about being a mutant? This pain? Yeah, turns out it's totally normal. And when it hits me, I shriek telepathically loud enough to wake not only Betsy (who is after all next door) but also Ms. Grey  _ and  _ Prof X, who both live at the far end of the mansion specifically to avoid being awakened by students' nightmares.

But they also have some goddamn painkillers that they're sure are safe for me, so at least I no longer feel like my left arm is going to vibrate off. I'm in the infirmary until they can figure out a) what's causing it and b) what can be done about it. They think it's somehow related to my powers, and why they wouldn't fire this afternoon, so I guess we're back to the assumption that I am a mutant?


	10. Chapter 10

**16 September**

I was afraid they wouldn't let me keep my call with Dr. McCoy, but this afternoon they asked what my preference was. The painkillers they've got me on keep me pretty loopy, but it's also the only way we've found that works 100%. I said I'd lived with the pain before, and that I wanted to keep my appointment. Ms. Munroe looked at me for a long time, but she agreed to let me try, so they turned off the IV drip at 1600, 2 hours before the call.   


Dr. McCoy was awesome! He is absolutely brilliant, and there is so much I could learn from him.   


He asked what was up, and I said I had some questions about the structural limits of the danger room, and he sounded kinda defensive, asking "What kind of questions?" And I was feeling on-edge from all the pain, and so I got kind of aggressive I guess, and was like, "Well, I output 9.6 gigajoules, which exceeds the safe thermal range for concrete pretty quickly, so what safeguards do you have in place for such an event?"   


And he was quiet for maybe 30 seconds, and then he started asking all sorts of questions -- what wattage I manage, and how long I can sustain that output, and what forms of energy I can use. And it was just really cool? Because it's the first time anyone's ever asked me questions I don't know the answer to. I told him my experience, and we could calculate some estimates off of that, but what I mostly got was a list of questions that need answers -- a list of experiments we need to run. Well, design first, but then experiment.   


But I was like, "Well I can't answer that question unless it's safe for me to maintain my maximum output for an extended period of time. Which gets us back to my original question." And he was like, "Yeah, that would be a really good thing to figure out."   


He said he'd run the calculations and let me know, and I said that if he had the specs then I could run the calculations myself, and then he was quiet for, like, a minute, and I thought he was going to yell at me or disconnect the call or something, but then I heard typing and he was like, "Your email address is keahi.alana@xavieracademy.com?" -- he even pronounced it correctly -- and I was like, "Yeah," and he was like, "It's on its way."   


So now I have the complete blueprints and engineering specs for the danger room! And it's probably going to be a couple weeks before I'm out of the infirmary anyway, so I'll have lots of time to see how dangerous my training really is. 


	11. Chapter 11

**7 October**

So it's been almost a month, and I have been poked and prodded and blood-sampled and tissue-sampled and analyzed and experimented on.   


The good news is, I actually got to be part of the discussion. Dr. MacTaggart was disinclined to share any of her results with me, but I begged, and I asked her to talk to Dr. McCoy, which she did, and he put in a good word for me I guess, and so she started at least explaining what she was doing.

So I now know a lot more about biology, and about all of the genes that commonly show modifications in mutants, and which genes tend to be associated with which types of powers. And I got a lot of new information on how nerve impulses are transferred, and how painkillers work, and why certain drugs can dampen certain mutant powers but not others.  


The bad news is, there's nothing physically wrong with me. Dr. MacTaggart has tried everything she can think of -- and everything I could think of -- and there's nothing there.   


The reason I can't control my powers -- either to not use them  _ or  _ to use them -- is that I'm fucked up psychologically. Dr. MacTaggart thinks I have PTSD from... that night. And until I get it sorted out, I'm not gonna be able to control this. And just...

Fuck. I don't even want to be a goddamned mutant, y'know? If it was just a matter of never using my powers, I'd be like, "See ya, suckers! I'm outta here!"

But it's not. The reason I can't  _ stop _ burning things is also the psychological fuck-up. So I either have to figure out how to fix it, or I have to find a place to live where nothing can be damaged by heat. And I'm pretty sure I can't survive on Venus. 


	12. Chapter 12

**9 October**

What helps?

It's a question the therapist asked me today, and I didn't have a good answer. Nothing fixes it. But she pointed out that it doesn't have to  _ fix _ it to make it worth doing. Any better is still better. So not what makes it go away, but what helps?

I don't know. That painkiller they had me on the weekend of my panic attack.   


Ice. I remember how ice helped even back way at the beginning. When I was still hiding from my parents.   


Exercise. Sometimes, on the not-so-bad days, I could even exercise it all away.   


It's not enough. It's never enough. Why does it have to hurt so much? I just want it to stop. 

  
  



	13. Chapter 13

**11 October**

I brought the list to Ms. Keo, and she was like, "Well, let's see what we can do to at least make it more tolerable." Which, like..

I mean, I want it to _stop_. I want it to be fixed. But also that's clearly not an achievable goal. Whereas making it tolerable -- that's a project I can get behind.  


So now one of the kitchen freezers has my own private supply of ice packs. 24 of them, so even if I change out packs between every class period, and every twenty minutes during non-school hours, I still will always have a fresh supply. I can ice my shoulder absolutely as much as I want, and no one will tell me I'm using too much or that I'm wasting resources or that I'm whining too much. I can just do whatever it takes to feel better, any time of the day or night.  


I'm also getting a physical therapist, twice a week, in addition to Ms. Keo and my superpower classes. Which gives me an "extracurricular" every day after school. Ms. Grey says that's OK, and my focus should be on those extracurriculars. She says that if I can't keep up academically then they'll defer my classes until next semester, because my recovery is more important. Which sounds fake, but OK. 


	14. Chapter 14

**15 October**

Met the physical therapist, Gil, today. He says I have a rotator cuff imbalance, due to weakness in my teres minor and infraspinatus. He gave me some exercises to do, pulling on an elastic band. It's easy enough, just boring.   


The exercises I had to do while he was there, now that was a different question. I understand that the point of it was to target muscles that don't normally work, but wow are my shoulders sore. On the plus side, at least I feel justified in using ice after actually having physically done some work, rather than just having some funny buzzy feeling in my arms because I'm apparently crazy or whatever. 


	15. Chapter 15

**16 October**

Today was bad. The pain was  _ intense _ , and ice wasn't helping. I mean, it was helping fine, until it melted, which was about 5 minutes into each class period. I started grabbing two during each passing period, but even that didn't help much.  


Then during statistics I suddenly felt the pack refreeze. The relief was so strong I actually gasped, and then had to apologize for interrupting class. Once the lecture started up again I looked around and Bobby grinned at me. I was so grateful I smiled back without thinking about it.  


After class I wasn't sure what to do -- is that like a talk-about-it-thing, or a we-acknowledged-it-now-don't-beat-it-to-death kind of thing? Or what? But Bobby just came up and asked if I wanted him to keep my packs frozen through the rest of the classes. And I was just like "Could you? Would you?" and he was like, "Yeah, np." So he sat next to me for the rest of the day, and we'd just swap out packs throughout the class period: I'd hand him mine when it thawed, and he'd hand me the one he was holding. And he'd fiddle with the first one until the second one melted, and when I handed him the second one the first one was frozen again.  


Danger room -- for the first time since my … incapacitation, tomorrow. According to the specs Dr. McCoy gave me, the danger room should be fine as long as I don't pour maximum output directly into the walls for more than an hour. Which should no problem, since my lesson's only 45 minutes.

So OK, I'm not going to send everyone to the hospital by collapsing the building around them. The next question is, can I hurt someone more directly? Have they taken into account the damage that could be done to people in the room with me at the time?


	16. Chapter 16

**17 October**

I didn’t even have to use my power today. My current assignment is ….meditation. Trying to control my qi, ffs -- an ancient Chinese "life force" that grants supernatural powers to anyone who can control it. Oh yeah -- and  _ doesn't exist _ .

Except ... neither do fucking fire benders, and yet here I am.

So I asked Mr. Summers if this actually helps. Like, do people get better control of their powers this way? And he said, "Sometimes."

But I guess the only way to tell if I'm one of them is to try it. Scientific experiment, of a sort. With no control and hella probability of placebo effect. But then again, I'm not trying to prove that it works in a randomized controlled trial. I'm trying to make sure I don't burn down any more buildings (or at least not any buildings I don't intend to burn down). In which case it doesn't matter whether it's a genuine effect or a placebo effect, so long as it works.

So all right. Meditation. I'm supposed to focus my attention in my toes, and then expand -- not move, but expand -- that attention until I am aware of my entire body at the same time.

...

OK, so trial one, it made it much worse. Made the buzzing in my arm worse, I mean. It was like, the farther up my body I moved, the more it compressed the buzzing into only one spot, and the more intense it felt.

But once I got up to my shoulders, and started down my arms, it actually started getting better. By the time I had my whole body contained in the... whatever. Awareness field. Whatever. It was actually feeling OK.

In the qi model, then, my problem is not too much qi in my arm (which is what it felt like -- so much energy it might explode out of me at any second) but rather too little. I can solve this problem by allocating qi to that appendage.

It's weird. But it does reduce the buzzing. It doesn't  _ hurt _ as much, and who cares why it works? I might have something else that helps.


	17. Chapter 17

**23 October**

I woke up today, went to stretch, and almost cried. I don't know what I did, but my hand doesn't work. My right hand. I wasn't even trying to stretch my hand; I just had it braced against my head so I could stretch my shoulders. But I guess something in the PT yesterday pulled something out of alignment. Or something. Maybe I overdid it, and when the muscle contracted, as they do when overtaxed, it pulled on some ligament which pulled on something else, which is pulling on my metatarsals. Who fucking knows.

It's the biggest thing I hate about anatomy, or really all of the life sciences: it's all fucking connected. You can't study a system in isolation, because nothing can be isolated; you fix this thing and it screws up this other thing; you fix that it and it messes up this other. You will never  _ ever  _ be able to fix the problem, because you will never ever be able to figure out all the relationships.

And anyway, there's no guarantee, in a system this interdependent, that there even  _ is  _ a solution. In a system of just  _ two  _ differential equations it's possible to have no solution -- situations where the best you can do is to waver back and forth between two suboptimal outcomes. And that’s just with two; we're talking dozens of interlocking systems just for my shoulder, much less the rest of my biology.

So I Googled hand stretches, which helped, but I could tell before I even got to breakfast that it was gonna be a bad day.

So I actually asked Bobby, when I got to chem, whether I could sit next to him. He was actually really cool about it (no pun intended), and pulled out a chair and kinda ... I dunno... snorted sympathetically? I guess if this kind of pain is common, he might be used to people asking him for that. Or I guess it’s possible that he’s had these problems himself.


	18. Chapter 18

**24 October**

I have danger room tonight. And I just don't think I can do it. It's just... 

Tonight I have to use my power. And the closer I get to it, the less capable I am of doing anything else.

This morning I... I mean, I haven't been able to do anything  _ useful _ all day, but I've known that for weeks -- I can’t do anything useful on training days, so I schedule extra time to catch up tomorrow. But at least this morning I could carry on a useful conversation. At noon I was at least capable of explaining homoscedasticity in non-jargon terms. Two hours later I can barely craft coherent sentences here in my own journal.

I don't want to do this. I don't want to  _ do _ this.

But they need me. No one else can do what I do. Refusing to act, when you're the only one who is capable of redirecting the trolley, is morally equivalent to murder.

If I don't use my power, whatever happens is my responsibility. I understand that. I have to go. If, someday, they  _ need _ a firebender, I have to be able to step up. 

But it hurts so much. That's the part I can't explain to anyone. It  _ hurts _ . The environment of combat hurts. Using my power hurts.

And above all, this terrible anticipation. I can't prepare: we don't know what's coming. If I focus on the wrong thing in my preparation, I'll be off-balance and unable to respond properly. Or worse, I'll misread the situation, and apply the remedy for problem A to a situation that's actually problem B which (depending on the problems in question) may be worse than not acting at all. I dare not go in with any preconceptions.

But there's no time to analyze in the moment either. By the time I've actually determined the problem and formulated a response, it's usually too late: the damage has already been done.

"You have to trust yourself" they say. "Just relax" they say. As if it's possible to relax because someone told you to.

The thing that no one seems to be able to grasp is that "Destroy this building and everything in it" is  _ on my list of automatic reactions _ . When I act on instinct, that is one of the possible outcomes. So no, I'm not going to "trust my instincts". A person who has that kind of instinct is  _ NOT A PERSON YOU SHOULD TRUST _ . To the extent that they have chosen to trust me anyway, it is on the basis of trusting that I will  _ not  _ indulge those instincts.

But then they're going to put me in a situation most likely to trigger that reaction. And then tell me to de-escalate a conflict.

I'll get through it. I know I will. I have every time so far. They've put safeties in place. I can't kill anyone. No one can kill me. I just have to get through. By 2100 it will all be over.

But in the meantime there's nothing I can do to prepare, and nothing I can do to take my mind off of it. And the tension is growing in my belly, and my stomach hurts, and my back hurts. And if I burst into tears then I'll have to explain what's wrong, and I don't have the energy to explain it all.

Let this cup pass from me. I don't want it. I don't want to be this person. Just take away my powers, let me be basic. Let me be useless. Let me be insignificant. Please. Just let it stop. I want it to end.


	19. Chapter 19

**26 October**

I melted a medicine ball today.

I was doing an exercise that the PT gave me, where I have to hold the ball against the wall, and then move it in circles by moving my shoulder blade. It's an incredibly non-intuitive way of doing things, but I guess I do too much with my elbows and my wrists and not enough with my shoulders, so this forces me to make use of different muscles. Which is a good idea as far as it goes, but it takes so much concentration that apparently I can't control my powers at the same time.

Fortunately I was able to cut it off before it did much more than deflate, so I didn't have to explain why we had a molten puddle of rubber on the gym floor. I don't know what they've told the guy, but it's definitely not that he's working at a school for mutants. From the tone he uses with me, I'm guessing the phrase "troubled youth" features prominently. I guess the sign out front says "gifted youngsters", but I still bet his briefing on me included "troubled youth." Which, I mean, is fine, I mean, I  _ am _ . I just wish I could be a troubled youth without having everyone treat me like I'm made of glass or like I'm going to attack them if they don't speak in soft soothing tones. Except how can I complain about it, when I am actually having to restrain myself from trying to hurt people?

I dunno. I guess I wish people would take a little more time to figure out what would actually help. If they're actually that scared of me, shouldn't they figure out what will  _ actually  _ make me feel more calm, instead of using that talking-to-dogs voice that makes it  _ harder  _ for me to keep my temper? And if I can keep my temper despite people constantly doing things that actually make it worse, shouldn't I get enough credit to be talked to like a normal person?

Anyway. Managed to convince him I'd just pushed on it too hard and popped it; said there must have been a weakness in the ball somewhere. He said we'd done enough for the day, and the secretary / security escort complimented me on my cover story.

I got a basketball and tried it again in my room, and I definitely cannot make it work without letting the power slip. Like, now that I know it's coming I can stop it before it gets to the basketball. But if I successfully do the exercise with my scapula, I let the heat out. If I successfully restrain my power, I find I'm using my elbow. I cannot get both at once no matter how many times I try.

I'm tired. I'm angry. There's no benefit to continuing this tonight. I can try again tomorrow.


	20. Chapter 20

**27 October**

It's not that I lose my concentration. I can solve differential equations while keeping my power in check. And OK, for me there are lots of things harder than diff eq -- small talk, for instance -- but still. I can keep it in check just fine -- by keeping my shoulders locked in place.

It's not the lack of attention. It's that this exercise disrupts the mechanism by which I keep my power in check.

I ...

I don't even know what the fuck to do with that.

I mean, honestly. What do I do? Do I just accept that I'm just going to hurt, always, every day, for the rest of my life?

And if not, then what? What alternative exists? What do I do? If not moving my scapulae causes atrophy and cramps, and moving them causes my power to go out of control, then what the hell options do I have? Just let it happen and fucking burn the house down?

Not again. Never again.

So what? Just hurt like hell? All the time? OK, fine. It's not like that actually changes anything about my life. But in that case I shouldn't have to do the goddamn fucking PT.

I can live with my shitty life. It's the people trying to convince me that it's not shitty, or that it shouldn't be shitty, or that they know the magic trick to make it not shitty, that I can't handle.


	21. Chapter 21

**30 October**

There definitely is some discussion going on behind my back. I wonder how they do it. Is there a nightly Keahi meeting? A Keahi-problems email distro? I mean, it's not surprising; I assume it's SOP for Troubled Youth. It's a little more surprising that they were willing to admit to it.

Anyway. Ms Keo asked about the medicine ball today. So I told her that I can't control my power while moving my scapula. And she nodded and "hm"d and looked all sympathetic, like that's supposed to help something. I'm not asking for sympathy; I'm just asking to not have to endlessly talk about problems that don't have solutions. But apparently that's too much to ask for.

Whatever. 10x mortality rate. Two hours a week is a small price to pay for an order of magnitude reduction in chance of death. I just have to put up with it long enough to get accepted into a decent engineering school with a good enough work-study program that I can get a degree.


	22. Chapter 22

**31 October**

I do have PTSD. Shit.

I actually looked up the diagnostic criteria, cuz I figured I should, to know what Ms. Keo was even talking about really. And, like, actually:

_ "Criterion A (one required): The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence" _

I was in the basement of a house whose foundation collapsed while it was on fire. So... check.

_ "Criterion B (one required): The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced, in the following way(s): Intrusive thoughts, Nightmares, Flashbacks, Emotional distress after exposure to traumatic reminders, Physical reactivity after exposure to traumatic reminders" _

Which I thought was where I was going to fail, but, like... I actually have at least two. Emotional distress... I mean I want to say it's no big deal, but looking at my entry from last week, I pretty clearly fucking do have emotional distress any time someone asks me to use my powers. And my physical pain  _ isn’t  _ physically caused. Which means I also have physical reactivity. 

And it turns out that if you  _ react  _ as if you were back in the situation when something reminds you of it, even if you cognitively know you're  _ not  _ back in the situation? That's a flashback. So every time I freeze, just like I did on that night. Every time Mr. Summers is begging me to do something -- anything -- and I just can't fucking do it? That... that might be flashbacks. And I definitely have nightmares. I might have every single one of these. Every single fucking one.

_ "Criterion C (one required): Avoidance of trauma-related stimuli after the trauma, in the following way(s): Trauma-related thoughts or feelings, Trauma-related reminders" _ So, like, not wanting to do the danger room? Totally PTSD. Or, a qualifier for it anyway

_ "Criterion D (two required): Negative thoughts or feelings that began or worsened after the trauma, in the following way(s): Inability to recall key features of the trauma, Overly negative thoughts and assumptions about oneself or the world, Exaggerated blame of self or others for causing the trauma, Negative affect, Decreased interest in activities, Feeling isolated, Difficulty experiencing positive affect" _

This one's harder. Weirder. I don't even know. I mean. I don't really  _ feel  _ like these apply? I felt isolated before. I had trouble being happy before. Ms. Keo says that I exaggerate my blame for what happened, but I am  _ literally the one who destroyed the house _ . How is it exaggeration to blame myself for the house burning down?

I guess what I'm saying is... I'm kind of trusting them on this one. Because I don't feel like it applies in any specifics, but I DO feel crappy af since that night, so....

_ "Criterion E (two required): Trauma-related arousal and reactivity that began or worsened after the trauma, in the following way(s): Irritability or aggression, Risky or destructive behavior, Hypervigilance, Heightened startle reaction, Difficulty concentrating, Difficulty sleeping" _ Now this one. This one fits perfectly. This is me. I'm irritable and I want to pick a fight with everyone and I destroy things without realizing it and I  _ can't _ be less vigilant or I'm going to light the bedclothes on fire but it doesn't make me less hypervigilant.

_ "Criterion F (required): Symptoms last for more than 1 month." _ check

_ "Criterion G (required): Symptoms create distress or functional impairment (e.g., social, occupational). _ " Ha. Let's all together, just for a moment, imagine a world where all of that doesn't cause social impairment. Right. We've got that  _ total impossibility _ fixed in our brains? Right. Moving on then.

_ "Criterion H (required): Symptoms are not due to medication, substance use, or other illness." _ If only. But we ruled that out months ago. Alas.

So. Yeah.

I have PTSD.

Fuck.


	23. Chapter 23

**6 November**

Ms. Keo says I'm not greedy enough.

I admitted that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with midterms and PT and her and danger room. And she said that maybe we should put some of that on hold for a week or two.

And honestly, that sounds great, but I'd rather put up with all that stress than figure out who has to approve my skipping PT, track that person down, convince them that I'm actually stressed out and not just whining, and then worry about how much trouble I got myself into by doing so.

So, OK, that contains a number of assumptions. That whoever I'd have to talk to would be skeptical and angry about my requesting a week off. That they would demand some kind of objective proof of my stress -- which itself contains an assumption that they don't care if I'm stressed out or hurt or sad. That even if I make a good case for it, they'd still be angry about "losing" the argument, and I'd have to watch my step around them in a way that would be more stressful than the damned PT.

And, like, technically yes, those are assumptions, and might not be true. But they seem to me to be pretty solid assumptions. Why should that person care if I'm overwhelmed or feel like the stress is going to kill me? I'm nothing to them. They have no reason to give a shit. The only relationship we have is that I  _ might  _ someday be a reasonably helpful member of their team.

And I'm making more work for them -- interrupting whatever they're doing, taking up time for this conversation, they'll have to make a phone call or send an email, and I don't know what bureaucratic complications might follow. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that they would be upset by that.

But OK. Let's examine alternatives. Ms. Keo points out that the "advantage" of having parents who are in the 95th percentile for shittiness is that my idea of normal behavior is skewed -- 95% of people are less shitty than I expect. Through the miracle of human neuroplasticity, I get to live in a world where  _ 95% of people are nicer than average! _

So suppose those assumptions are wrong. Suppose this person is very nice, and cares about my feelings. Suppose their idea of help is not about making me more effective in combat or making me less likely to burn the house down, but rather is about making me feel better. Suppose they don't mind the extra work, or even -- for some reason -- think that I'm worth the extra work. Suppose they care more about actually helping than about feeling like they're helping, and so they're grateful that I've helped them do a better job of it. Then what?

Then... I guess I could ask. I grant that if these premises are true, asking would make sense. But from a false premise, anything follows. I don't believe these premises  _ are _ true.

_ But  _ also I can't deny that my brain is fucked up, especially the judgement parts of it, and I can't fully trust it. Ms. Keo thinks that these premises are correct, and mine are false. And... I have to admit that her model explains the data much better. Someone's paying money for me to see a physical therapist twice a week -- even with insurance that's not cheap, and I have no idea if they can get insurance on a bunch of runaway kids anyway. Maybe if you treated it as a corporation? I don't know, and that's not relevant. The point is, a lot of people here have gone to a lot of effort to help me, when they really don't have to. When it would have been objectively more sensible -- cheaper, easier, and safer -- to kick me back out onto the streets. The expected return-on-investment that I represent is really unlikely to be positive, and they're competent enough to recognize that. It... makes a lot more sense if they, in some sense, care about my health and safety.

When two models contradict, the only way to resolve the question is with experimental evidence. But I can't... I'm so stressed out already. How can I add something else? Because I still think she's wrong, and I can't take someone being angry at me on top of the midterms and danger room and everything. I just can't.


	24. Chapter 24

**7 November**

Got notice today that my PT session for Friday and Monday have been cancelled. And today Mr. Summers asked what I wanted to do in the danger room, instead of just assigning exercises. So I guess the Keahi-problem distribution list is good for something.


	25. Chapter 25

**15 November**

All day I've had nothing but people nagging at me. It's exhausting. None of it a big deal. James needs his sample heated; Art needs help calculating normal force for physics class; Kasey is shivering and needs a little boost. It's fine, it's all well within my capability, and it's nice to actually be able to help. But it's a lot to keep track of, to be thinking about, on top of my own homework, and the journaling and meditation and shit I'm supposed to be doing for Ms. Keo. Especially since James was asking for chemistry tutoring tonight.

Now I'm sitting here in the dining room, and James is nowhere to be seen, and I texted him and he didn't respond. I should be relieved, right? Now I have my evening to myself, I can get my homework (classwork and therapy homework) done, and maybe get to bed early. That's good, right? Except instead I'm sitting here crying, feeling lonely as fuck, feeling like no one wants me.

Dammit, I can't have it both ways! You don't get to be upset when people want to be with you, and then be upset when they don't. This isn't Schrodinger's Sociability Score; you have to pick one.

But... I wanted to feel like someone wanted me around. James acted like we might hang out also, and I was looking forward to spending time with someone

I like helping people, I do. It's nice to actually get to use my power to help people, instead of only causing destruction. Honestly if you'd told me 6 months ago, I'd've thought that was all I need to be happy. And it is way,  _ way  _ better than maybe-killing people when I panic, or even than burning the library table.

But it turns out it would be nice to just have friends, too. Someone who would hang out with me even if they didn't need something warmed up.


	26. Chapter 26

**22 November**

Is it weird that this was the best Thanksgiving I ever remember having?

I kind of expected to be lonely, but of course, there are actually a lot of kids here who can't go home for the holiday. Rogue's a runaway, like me. Bobby's not out to his family, and while he  _ could _ go home, he says it's a lot more comfortable not to. Betsy I guess is kind of a Harry Potter situation -- she's not, like, in danger if she were to go home, but she and her parents are both happier if she doesn't. I think there's only like 2 students here who their parents know they're mutants and are fine with it, and the only reason they're here is that the training program is good.

So at least 3/4 of the student body stayed here. We didn't have classes, obviously, so it was just kind of a hanging-out kinda day. Which, like, it always has been, but this time I didn't have to sit in the same room with the football game. I could read my book in the library without anyone making fun of me. When I got tired of people and went back to my room, no one said anything other than "good night."

And I didn't have to pretend. Didn't have to act like I found their raunchy bigoted jokes funny, didn't have to fake being interested in a conversation about people I didn't know, didn't have to act like I was enjoying myself when people teased me about not liking cranberries. I was allowed to eat what I want, and talk when I want, and not-talk when I want, without anyone making a big deal of it.

It was like... like they cared about me enjoying the day. Instead of my having to be a prop for someone else's enjoyment of the day. I wasn't there to complete my mother's mental image of a perfect Thanksgiving. It was allowed to be a holiday for  _ me _ , to do things  _ I _ wanted to do.

So yeah. Best Thanksgiving ever. And now that I think about it, that's not weird at all.


	27. Chapter 27

**28 November**

As I understand PTSD -- which is admittedly not very well -- I have a reasonably high chance of not being able to remember any of what happened today. I need to write it all down so I can remember and process it. I'm sure Ms. Keo will be asking.

So yeah. Started off as your normal enough Wednesday. Until Ms. Grey burst into Civics class and rushed up to have a whispered conversation with Ms. Munroe. They went back and forth a few times, and then Ms. Munroe shook her head, pointed at me, and said, "Take Keahi." Ms. Grey looked at me, and then her eyes got wide and she nodded and told me to come with her. So I did.

She told me to grab warm clothes and meet her on the basketball court, which I did, and it turns out the basketball court doubles as a helipad. Mr. Summers and Ms. Grey were already inside the helicopter, wearing some sort of body armor -- I don't know if it was the kind for, like, motorcycles, or some sort of combat armor. As soon as I'd climbed inside and gotten seated, Mr. Summers took off. Ms. Grey had to help me buckle myself in.

It's not far to the mountains, by helicopter. I mean, out to the nearest mountains, in the Big Indian wilderness. So Ms. Grey only had time to explain the bare outline. A warmer-than-usual winter day, after a heavy snowfall. A pretty, wide valley, popular for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. She had just enough time to confirm where this was going -- avalanche -- when Mr. Summers put us down on a parking lot at the bottom of a -- yes, extremely beautiful -- valley. Glacier-formed. #irony

I must have been freaked out. I have to have been. But I don't remember that. I just remember looking at the shape of the valley, to analyze its drainage, while Mr. Summers went to reassure the people in uniforms -- search and rescue, maybe -- that we were here to help or whatever.

I remember turning to Ms. Grey and asking -- demanding, really -- confirmation that she was telekinetic. She asked why, and I snapped back -- rather exasperatedly -- that I was about to cause a month's worth of snowmelt, and it would be good if it didn't cause a flash flood that swept the nice search-and-rescue folks away.

She asked if I couldn't just evaporate it, and I was like, "No!” I was pretty short with her, I’m pretty sure, but I mean… seriously. First of all, if I sublimate it, anyone we found would go from freezing to boiling in seconds, which could send their body into shock. And even if it doesn't do that, there's an excellent chance of burning them. Secondly, that would send, just,  _ tons  _ of water vapor into the atmosphere and who knows what effect that's going to have? Clouds, for sure. Thunderous downpours? A blizzard? Icy fog that will prevent us taking off? And thirdly, no one actually knows what my sustainable output level is. _ _

I remember trying to calculate. It  _ was _ a warm day, the snow just below freezing, fortunately. If I need to heat it 3 degrees centigrade to get liquid water, that’s 3 times 4184 times however many kilograms of snow I'm looking at. I remember thinking that at least I’d be able to tell Dr. McCoy how long I can sustain maximum output. 

I melted out the drainage ditch first, that ran along the road. Started downstream as far as I could reach, where it ran into a little pond. We would overflow it quickly, but it should be able to flood without causing too much damage. Water flow would keep the ditch clear for as long as we needed it.

I melted down to the wildflowers for 3-4 meters, before I realized I only needed to melt down to whatever depth of snow had been there before the avalanche. That was trickier -- took some fine tuning -- but since we'd had most of a meter of snow already, it cut down the energy required quite a bit. I could clear much larger swaths at a time.

I remember the first one we found. The avalanche had carried him almost down to the road before it hung up on the 3-meter rise after the ditch. His skis were snapped in half, but it looked like he'd been able to ride the avalanche most of the way down -- he wasn't too badly battered, just buried under 4 meters of snow and ice. But he got enough air. He was still breathing. Just shivering, nonstop. I remember I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "I'm going to warm up your clothes, OK?" And he nodded, and I concentrated on making sure I get them up to about 50C. (Polyester, surprisingly, doesn't melt until 250C, but it can get uncomfortable for humans long before that point).

And then the search and rescue people were there and doing first aid, and once they realized what Mr. Summers meant when he said I was good with heat, they were too intent on how to make use of me to worry about any mutantphobia they might have.

They knew where the paths were, which meant I could focus on the places we were most likely to find people. And we discovered that Ms. Grey could "hear" the people buried, which meant I only had to melt large amounts when there was actually someone there. Between people, I only had to melt enough snow for us to be able to move around. Once the search and rescue people realized what the hangup was, one of them ran down and got us some spare snowshoes, so all I had to do was melt snow where the people were.

I remember Ms. Grey dithering, uncertain whether she'd actually "heard" someone or not -- it was faint, and of course that's a disadvantage of having a loud thinker like me on the search team. But we'd saved enough on other efficiencies that I knew I could afford to waste some, so I ended the discussion by just melting down until I found something. In this case a person. 

We found 18. The search and rescue people did triage while Ms. Grey and I did another pass over the valley between the paths, just in case we'd missed someone. When we got back, Mr. Summers said he'd volunteered to take the two in critical condition -- the ones who  _ had  _ been battered about by rocks or trees -- in to town, since North Salem doesn't have a flight for life program.

So we rode to the hospital with the EMT, the two victims, the two teachers, and me. It was mostly a quiet ride. It's hard to talk in a helicopter anyway, and none of us knew each other well enough to want to have a conversation. The most that happened was that the EMT asked if I could help get their core temperature up. And I said yes, what temperature did she want them to be at? And she said 98 degrees, and I said sure. 

We landed and Ms. Grey jumped out to get some ER nurses to assist. The EMT said she could get back on her own. So once Ms Grey gets back I think we're heading home. 


	28. Chapter 28

**29 November**

We got home after midnight. Ms Grey told me to go to bed, and I was only too happy to comply. I even slept for an hour, maybe. Maybe an hour and a half. But now it's 0254 and I can't get to sleep. I can't get my body to stop twitching: legs, back, shoulders. I can't make my mind stop racing. Physiological arousal, I guess, from an event too similar to The Trauma. Certainly I've never put out that much heat since the day in the tunnels under New York City. 

But I can't stop thinking about it. My god, look what I did. I melted an entire hillside -- OK, not an entire hillside, but half a hillside anyway -- of snow. Who knows what effect that's going to have, downstream.

I poured billions of Joules into snowbanks where we didn't know if there were people there or not. I could have roasted someone, if the heat wasn't as evenly spread as I intended. I heated up polyester coats and ski pants -- I could have melted their clothing to them if I'd miscalculated only slightly.

And that flight to the hospital! Putting heat directly into them! I could have killed them, with the wrong burst of energy in the wrong place!

I could have killed any of them. If I had been just the slightest bit off. Hell, I might have killed them -- we don't know how any of them are doing. For all we know, I screwed up something that won't have an effect for another 24 hours.

But writing it down ... has helped, I think. It's all here. If I want to worry about it tomorrow, I can pick up right where I left off, without risking losing a single concern.

So I might be able to sleep. I'll give it a shot. See what I can do, in the 48 minutes before the alarm goes off.


	29. Chapter 29

**29 November, evening **

I did get ... whatever. 45 minutes of sleep. Plus whatever I got hitting snooze four times. I figured I'd get breakfast and then see whether I could do class or if I'd have to fake a migraine. Or if I'd actually have a migraine by the end of the meal.

But I finished breakfast feeling surprisingly good, so I went ahead and went to class. Ms. Munroe looked at me oddly, but no one said anything. I don't know if everyone had been warned not to bug me or what, but actually no one said anything to me, all day. Which was good, because I had enough energy to listen to lectures, but not nearly enough energy to try to explain anything. And definitely not enough energy to make small talk.

I guess I should have anticipated that Ms. Keo was going to want to talk about it today. It's not like a special session or anything; I always see her on Thursdays, but that was like, her opening line.

Which, I mean, was good in that it was another opportunity to go over it, go through it. And it was nice to feel like we had something to talk about other than how fucked up the inside of my head is. Although we got to that too, cuz I told her about how I couldn't sleep this morning, thinking of all the ways I could have screwed it up.

And she pointed out the essential point I somehow keep overlooking: I didn't. I could have, but I didn't. The news confirmed it. All 18 made it. The two in the hospital are stable and expected to recover. (I'm "an unidentified mutant")

I didn't kill anyone. I did the opposite. Eighteen people are alive because of me.

I don't even know. I'm too tired to figure it out right now. It's 1900; I can go to bed. I've earned a night off, one way or another, surely.


	30. Chapter 30

**1 December**

I'm awake. Why am I awake? It's six am. It’s 6AM on a  _ Saturday. _ I'm a teenager; we don't get up at 6 am. Maybe we do. Maybe mutant teenagers don't go through the circadian shift that the unmutated do. No one would know.

Well, no. These people would know. They have enough data. And the fact that classes don't start until 10AM strongly suggests that mutant teenagers are just like the unmutated in that regard.

This is entirely irrelevant. The point is, it's 0600 and I'm awake because my shoulder is in agony and my arm is buzzing again. I tried rolling over, I tried changing my sleeping posture. Nothing works. I tried sitting up and rocking back and forth, which at least takes my mind off of it, but nothing fixes it, nothing helps.

OK. OK. That's not true. Nothing makes it all better, but there are things that help. What helps?

Ice. We know ice helps. I was specifically told I could get ice any time of the day or night, out of my personal ice pack stock. I could go get ice, and it wouldn't make it all go away, but it would make it hurt less. Pain management is widely agreed to be worthwhile medical intervention even when cure is not possible.

*

So OK, ice. Ice helps. I've got ice on both shoulders, and at least it reduces the buzzing.

What helps. What helps. I have this written down. I can flip through my journal and see what else has been helpful.

*

The qi thing helped. It was dumb, but it did work, one way or the other. I can try that.


	31. Chapter 31

**3 December**

I'm cold.

I can't remember the last time I was cold. I mean, the last time I was well-fed and cold. 

I didn't even notice. Really. Just kept piling on sweaters. Until the PT asked about it, I wasn't really paying attention. But normally I wear a tank top to PT, because it makes it easier for him to see what's going on with my shoulder, and I didn't on Friday, and I didn't today, and he asked about it. Because I was moving in a way that indicated maybe cramping, or stiffness anyway, in my shoulders, in a way that you get if your muscles are too cold.

So he asked if I'd skipped my warm up the last two times, and I was confused, because I never have warmed up before PT. But here's what I think is true:

I think, maybe, I've been regulating my body temperature with my power, without realizing that I was doing it. I haven't been cold, really, since I hit puberty, not if I’ve had enough to eat. At the time I just assumed it was a metabolic effect of hormonal changes. Not needing a sweater was really the least of the changes my body was going through.

But if that's true then my power is... what? Gone?

I tried lighting a paper on fire, and that worked fine. But it was... I don't know? Harder? Slower? Maybe just that it was more exhausting. Igniting paper should be trivial. And it happens, just as fast, I think -- I've never timed it; I should collect data on that -- but it felt just so hard.

So my power isn't gone. It's reduced somehow -- suppressed, worn out, overtaxed, drained ... something. I have no idea. I know nowhere near enough biology to even guess at the mechanisms of my power -- it's definitely not normal metabolism; I'd have to have eaten about a thousand pizzas last Wednesday -- much less how it might be affected over time. We're talking about a PhD in biochem to even answer the first question.

OK. So. All models are wrong, but some are useful. What's a useful model, here?

Gas tank? That I can use my power a certain amount and then I have to refuel? It's a straightforward model, but I don't  _ feel  _ like I'm out of gas. Maybe I have a separate gas tank for my power vs for my other uses of energy? That would make sense given that the power definitely arises from a different biological process than normal metabolic functions.

But my power does work. Shouldn't it be tapering off, if I'm running out of fuel? I guess not if I'm well-engineered; a car keeps running the same until seconds before it sputters and dies. So that model is feasible. If that's the case, then what should I do? I need to figure out what my "gasoline" is and how to get it into my "tank".

Or maybe it's like a muscle, and really does have the potential to work more-or-less infinitely, but push too hard, too fast, and you'll strain it. That feels right, inasmuch as I do feel like it's been strained. Like, it  _ works  _ \-- I can put weight on it if I have to -- but it hurts to do so, and it doesn't perform as well.

It hurts. How could I have not noticed that it hurts?

OK. So if we think it's a strain, then what course of action? If that's the model we're using, then I would have to do superpower rehab: rest, not use it, and figure out what the mutant power equivalent of ice and ace bandages is. Test it every few days to see if it's ready to be used again, and then ramp up over time, carefully increasing the stress at a pace that's slow enough to not overtax it and re-injure it, but fast enough to provide some stress and force it to adaptively improve.  


OK. So in that case we're not so concerned with max output as with maximum repeatable output: how much can I do in one day, and still be able to do that amount the next day?

The thing is, there's only one way to test that. And if I sprain it again, then I have to go through the whole rest-and-recovery period  _ again _ .

But I also don't know any other way to do it. And it won't get done any faster if I don't do the experiment.

Ugh. OK. So. Rest and recovery. No using my powers this week. Focus on my health, and my PT, and I guess on my therapy. Surely Ms. Keo has some PTSD trauma work or something I can do. And then try it out next week and see how it feels.

Eighteen people. Probably a radius of, let's say, a meter and a half -- no, diameter of a meter and a half, radius of .75m, and a depth of on average maybe also a meter and a half. So .75^2 _ pi _ 1.5*18=call it 50 cubic meters of snow. Call it 500kg per m^3 means 2500 kg * 4184 * 3 degrees centigrade means 300 million joules. So although I can put out almost two orders of magnitude more than that, 300 million is an amount we know strains me.

The fastest way to find a number is binary search algorithm: divide in half, determine which half your target lies in, repeat. So I need to know whether I can handle 150 million joules. So sometime in the next week or so, I need to figure out a safe test that would use 1.5E8 joules of energy.


	32. Chapter 32

**4 December**

I strained it again. Bloody hell. I didn't even think about it. I got to dinner late after Ms. Keo, and they'd saved me a plate, but my dinner was cold. So I heated it up. And now it hurts all over again. 

I had no idea how often I use my power until I had to try to stop. I'm gonna have to make a comprehensive list. And then start figuring out other ways to deal with these things. 

Also I'm supposed to be working with Mr. Summers in the danger room tomorrow, and I have no idea how I'm gonna square that with not using my powers at all. 

Bloody hell. 


	33. Chapter 33

**5 December**

Actually that went better than expected. Mr. Summers started off by asking how I was doing. And I was quiet, cuz I was not at all sure what to do with that question. And he got kind of exasperated, and was like, "That's not a trick question. You did a lot of work last week. We need to know how you recover from stuff like that."

So I told him that it felt kind of like a muscle strain, and that I'd re-strained it yesterday. And he said that made sense, and prescribed kind of the same thing I was thinking, of rest for a week and then re-evaluate. 

I asked if it was the same for everyone, and he said not. So I asked, and he operates on the gas tank model: he gets recharged by sunlight, and can actually lose his power if he spends enough time in a pitch-black room. Ms. Grey's telepathy works like a sense, and can no more be worn out than you can "use up" your hearing or your sense of touch. I described the different models I'd thought of, and he said that was a good way of thinking of it, and asked if he could use it for other trainees. 

So we're trying the muscle model for mine, and resting for this week. He also said we'd have to figure out how much I could handle, and I explained about how I need to figure out a way to try 150 kilojoules and he said he'd see what he could come up with.


	34. Chapter 34

**9 December**

OK, so it's been... what? A week? 10 days, I guess. Shouldn't I be, like, at least a little better?

PT tomorrow, and Ms. Keo on Tuesday, and I don't know what to do with this. Like, I get that this is exactly the kind of thing that therapy is for. This is as clear a necessity for therapy as anything: PTSD, nightmares, fear. Feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to do, and crying at random times throughout the day. I can't sleep, I can't hold still, but I'm too tired to do anything. I slept for two hours today and I'm still ready for bed at 1915. I'm alternating between being too hot and being too cold. I'm a fucking mess.

But what am I supposed to say? I mean, you can just imagine that conversation:

"Hey, Ms. Keo, I'm, like, super anxious" "Oh? Why?" "Well, I don't know how I feel about becoming this thing I'm becoming." "What thing is that, Keahi?" "Oh, you know... a superhero." "I'm sorry?" "You know. The kind of person who uses their superpower to save people's lives. Keep them safe. Help them out. I can feel myself turning into that and I'm afraid of it." "??????"

Like I  _ know  _ it sounds stupid. I agree it's stupid.

It's also how I feel.

Last week I made the decision to use my superpower to help someone out. I looked at the situation, I recognized that I could make it better, and I took the actions I was capable of to make it happen. I didn't worry about what might or might not happen to me. I didn't worry about whether it was going to hurt me. I just saw an opportunity to help someone, and made the judgement that no one else could help as well as I could, and so I took over the proceedings and I did what I thought was best.

And I can't stop freaking out about it. I'm just completely torn up with ... ??

Fear? Like, it's certainly as all-consuming as fear, but it's just... not. I mean, fear is worrying about the future. It's for when you think something might go wrong. I know nothing is going to go wrong because it  _ didn’t _ . We got through it. There's nothing to be worried  _ about _ .

Guilt? I mean, kinda. It's what feels closest. But for what? For saving someone's life? No, obviously not. I mean I'm not even sorry. Take me back in time and give me a chance to change it and I'd do the same thing in a heartbeat. I don't regret a single decision I made.

But the weight of it bears on me. I made the decision that I was the one best suited to make decisions, and I followed through on that. And the thing is, I was  _ right _ . The data bear it out. I made decisions, and I made good decisions, and people are alive because of the decisions I made. Which means that I made, if not  _ the  _ right choice, at least  _ a  _ right choice. But still. I made life-or-death decisions.

I don't want to be the kind of person who makes life or death decisions.

If I make them, I will make some of them wrong. Like, that's just a truth. No one makes the right decision 100% of the time. So the more decisions I make, the more wrong decisions I will make. And the more important of decisions I make, the more important the decisions I will get wrong.

But the decisions have to get made.

Someone has to make these decisions. Right now someone  _ is  _ making these decisions. Do I have faith that the grown-ups making them now are doing better than I would do?

Hah.

Someone has to make these decisions. And because no one gets it right 100% of the time, wrong decisions will be made. The goal, then, is not to give the decision to someone who is  _ guaranteed _ to get it right, but rather to give it to someone who is  _ most likely _ to get it right.

And if that's me, and I decline to make the decision, I'm not really reducing the odds of a bad outcome. I'm just pushing the guilt for the bad outcome onto someone else, because I don't feel like dealing with it. And that's ...

I don't like this thing I'm becoming. But I like  _ that  _ thing even less. I'm not going to pretend that the moral consequences of my actions belong to someone else.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not scared of getting it wrong. I didn't get it wrong this time. I thought I was most qualified to make the decision, and I was.

Maybe what scares me is the idea that I  _ am  _ the most qualified. That I  _ am  _ the person who should be doing this. If that's the case, then the rest of the world is even smaller, and more temperamental, and more irrational, than I am.

If I accept this responsibility -- and the evidence suggests I should -- then I am leaving a world where people can make things right, and I can rely on heroes to come in and save the day. I'm giving up a chance to believe in a world where authorities take away risks and best practices solve problems. I'm stepping into a world where it's just a bunch of people, doing the best they can, which mostly consists of running around randomly doing stuff.

But ... that's the world where I actually live. The other thing ... was an illusion. If the box does not contain a diamond then I wish to believe that the box does not contain a diamond. I can't actually make the heroes more capable of saving the day by believing that they can.

I can make the heroes more capable of saving the day by suiting up, and joining them, and giving them the use of my powers and my perspective.


	35. Chapter 35

**11 December**

Talked to Ms. Keo about it today. And she listened, and did not act like I was crazy. Which was weird, because I sure feel crazy.

She made the point that I can't rely on heroes  _ as perfect people who save the day _ . But the whole point of the X-Men is that people can rely on them. And that means they rely on each other, too. I can’t rely on them to always be right. But I could -- maybe -- rely on them to help me to the best of their ability.


	36. Chapter 36

**19 December**

This afternoon as I finished class and stepped outside the classroom getting ready to head to the danger room, I was stopped by a woman who introduced herself as Morrigan Oghenekevwe, and told me I was to take my Wednesday afternoon lesson with her. So I went and got my coat as instructed, and followed her outside. 

So what it turned out to be was a way for me to expend 150 kilojoules and not hurt anything. It's December; we have snow. The groundskeeper needs to clear snow. The mansion grounds have more snow than I could possibly melt even at full strength. Therefore I can melt as much snow as I want, without hurting anything or anyone. Ms Oghenekevwe was mostly there to direct me so I could clear the most useful bits of snow. I mean, as long as you have someone who's going to melt a bunch of snow, you might as well have her melt the stuff that is most annoying to you.

So she asked how much I could melt, and I said it depended on how cold it was and whether she wanted it raised to just above freezing or evaporated. So we talked it over, and did some calculations, and in the end I ended up clearing some of the paths around the grounds.

I don't know if it was exactly half of what I did a couple weeks ago, but it should be pretty close. And... so far so good.


	37. Chapter 37

**25 December**

I'm not sure what I expected out of my first Christmas away from home. Loneliness, I guess. I mean, I had Thanksgiving, so I knew it wasn't gonna be, like, devastating. But about half of the students go home (or something; Nate’s parents have cut him off, but his grandmother still supports him, so at least he has somewhere to go) for winter break. Bobby calls it the "annual pilgrimage to ensure continued funding". So it was a lot quieter.

And I mean, yeah, I only got one Christmas present. But that was infinitely more than I was expecting. I woke up with a stocking on my bedroom door, and it had an orange, and a chocolate bar, and an Amazon gift card, and a book -- a popular-science type book about materials engineering. And I guess it doesn't cost them much, compared to the cost of running this school at all, to give each homeless child a stocking with a gift card and a few sweet things in it. But the book has to have been individually chosen. Someone on staff was paying enough attention to pick out a materials science book for me. Someone cared enough to pick out a present that I would  _ actually _ enjoy.

And I mean, yeah, it was a little bit lonely. A five-star Christmas dinner can't make up for having none of your family around. But really, is that any different from what Nate’s going through? I've got 0 family, he's got 1 -- that's not even statistically significant. Or what Bobby's going through? Yeah, he's got family around, but he's not really  _ with _ them, is he? There's this wall between them, and I'm not sure it's any less of a barrier than Rogue and I have between us and our families.

So honestly, I think it was one of the least lonely Christmases I've had in a while. Yeah, there weren't a lot of people around. But the people who were around wanted me here. Cared enough about me to see me, care what I wanted. Didn't make any veiled comments about my not talking, or criticize when I spent the day reading the book that they got for me. I didn't feel nearly as alone as I used to feel in Grandma's living room, surrounded by cousins.


	38. Chapter 38

**1 January**

School starts up again tomorrow, which is kinda weird to think about. On the one hand, for the first time I can remember, I'm actually less stressed out at the end of holidays than I was at the beginning. I got to relax, I got to do things that actually help me out, I'm actually caught up on homework. 

On the other hand, I've never been so reluctant to start school again, despite being better prepared to do so. This time off thing is nice.

I guess the difference is, staying home has never really been a reward for me. I remember in 2nd grade people thinking I was weird because Monday was my favorite day of the week, but it makes sense if you remember that at home, mom is always on the lookout for things I'm doing wrong and reasons to punish me, and so I have to spend all my time hiding and trying not to exist. Whereas at school, no one gives a shit. If I stay quiet -- which I'm really good at -- they're perfectly happy with me.

So yeah, I was always super-ready to go back to school after winter break, because I was  _ exhausted _ . At school I could let my guard down, zone out, and recover. Plus, school meant homework, which meant an excuse to leave the living room and go downstairs and shut my door. I'm not being antisocial, mom, I'm being  _ responsible _ . Don't you  _ want _ me to get good grades? God, I wonder if that's part of the reason I never did my homework over break: I needed to have an excuse to leave, all the way through break, which I couldn't have done if I'd finished it all up in the first two days. Fuck.

Anyway, this was better. There was a New Year's Eve party in the common room last night, and we all hung out on the beanbag chairs and watched movies -- old ones, that everyone has seen, so no one cares if you talk through it, because we all know all the words anyway. Except sometimes someone would shush everyone, and we'd all watch while Inigo said "I want my father back you son of a bitch", and then everybody would cheer, and then we'd go back to whatever we were doing before.

Remy was teaching some people poker in the corner, so I joined that for a while. I did pretty well once we kicked all the telepaths and clairvoyants out of the game, so I ended up running a little workshop on how to count outs and calculate odds.

By the time that was done, the telepaths had started their own poker game, so I watched that for a while, and let me tell you, it is a real treat to watch a telepath try to beat a clairvoyant while they're both up against a probability manipulator. Eventually they made me stop watching when they realized Betsy was using my mental calculations of odds, which the others couldn't access, so I wandered back to the couch and watched Return of the Jedi. We stayed up, watched the ball drop, and then -- since we don't have classes today -- stayed up some more. I went to bed around 0200, but I gather the party was still going at 0500 when the staff set out a breakfast buffet, allowing anyone to come get food whenever we all got up.

I think I'm gonna take the day and read the thing Dr. McCoy sent me on heat-resistant fabrics.


	39. Chapter 39

**2 January**   
So... Bobby was in my training class today. Already there when I got down to the training room. (I'm not as prompt to training as I am to physics class.) I asked what he was doing there, and he shrugged and said he'd been moved to Wednesday, which briefly gave me hope that maybe I'd been moved  _ off  _ of Wednesday, but since Mr. Summers wasn't there yet I couldn't ask, so I couldn't leave. And while I was thinking about it, Bobby encased my left arm in ice.

I looked over at him and he just grinned, and I flipped him off. Only in order to do so I had to melt enough ice that I could move my arm. And as soon as I got myself into position, he froze my arm again, this time with middle finger extended. So I melted that ice, and he went for my torso, and I finally just heated all of my skin to the point where ice couldn't form on it. Which made for quite the exciting steam bath, when he tried.

And he laughed, and built an ice box around me, which I thought about heating straight past the vaporization point, but decided to just melt the bottom 10cm instead; the ice crashed to the ground and shattered, and while he was ducking debris, I decided to heat up his arm. Not enough to hurt; just enough to be uncomfortable. It took him a minute to catch on; heat-sensitive thermoreceptors don't have the a-delta fibers, so they don't conduct the nerve impulses as quickly. Then he kind of yipped, and jumped back, and finally encased his  _ own  _ arm in ice.

I asked if he couldn't cool himself directly, and he said no, he could only make ice. Which led, by the time Mr. Summers got there, to us experimenting with how and whether he could stop or block an attack from me.

Bobby's  _ good. _ Once he was on guard, I could barely get a hit in on him. The thing is, he can't directly counter heat, but (laws of thermodynamics and Einstein be damned) he can make a  _ lot  _ of ice. And he can make it  _ very  _ cold. And cold ice can absorb a  _ lot  _ of energy. We ended up with an ice shield between us, with me pouring all my energy into heating it up, and him rebuilding it just as fast as it melted. I finally backed off before I sprained something, and said, "Damn, dude."

Bobby laughed. And Mr. Summers came farther into the room from the doorway, where he had apparently decided to sit and watch, out of the way.

I've never thought of myself as a brute-force sort of person. Engineering is about finding efficient solutions to problems. Throwing more energy at something is the wrong answer. And I thought I'd been pretty good about it. But it turns out that I've never had to worry about being particularly efficient with my superpower. My experiments with Ms. Oghenekevwe were mostly about trying to expend a certain amount of energy after all. Efficiency was not a benefit. And I was too worried about avalanche victims to worry about efficiency that day. Just throwing more energy at it has always been enough to solve the problem, whatever the problem was.

Bobby also has better combat reflexes than I do. Mr. Summers had me try to melt through the ice wall in just a tiny spot, to just shoot through a centimeter-wide tunnel, like he would make, and that, obviously, took more effort to control it, and my precision was not that great. But also, in the time it took me to get myself focused enough to pour heat into only the tiniest speck of shield, Bobby was able to get _his_ attention focused on that same area. I could melt faster than he could build it, but he could control his power better. I kept wavering and melting parts that didn't need melting, and before I could get myself re-aimed he'd filled in everything I'd melted.

It helped, really. For the first time, I felt like there was something other than my unstable, unreliable control that was keeping me in check. The end of the lesson came suddenly; for once I hadn't been counting down the seconds until I could go. Bobby shook my hand and ... invited me? Dragged me? I don't know. He didn't lay a hand on me, and he didn't say anything, but somehow I ended up sitting with him and Rogue at dinner. It was... nice. To think about something other than my fucked-up brain and my fucked-up rotator cuff and my fucked-up life, if only for a half-hour.

I declined movie night. I don't.... I have too much to think about right now.

Honestly, as a supposedly terrifying and deadly mutant, I made a terrible showing. If it'd been a real combat....

Well, I guess it would have been a stalemate. Bobby couldn't do much to me, either. He could make enough ice to protect himself, but not enough to restrain me. Certainly not enough to give me hypothermia. So I guess it would have depended on the goals. I probably would have won a retrieval mission, as long as I was allowed to destroy whatever Bobby was supposed to obtain. I almost certainly would have lost an assassination mission.

Of course, in most cases, I could have won combat by just bringing the building down on him. And anyway, it's not the strength of my power that makes me dangerous, it's the lack of control over it. And so really it's not terribly reassuring that I can potentially be beat because I can't control my power.

But a little bit. Because as long as I can't control it, there's a good chance that Bobby could restrain me. And if he can, surely one of the teachers could. As long as I lose control, there's a good chance they can stop me.

And if I  _ do  _ learn to control it, then it's OK that I'm too powerful to be stopped. I can stop myself. I can learn to control this. I just have to practice. Dump shitloads of XP into it. And quickly. Because the sooner I can control this --  _ really  _ control it, with the precision and focus that Bobby has for his power -- the sooner I can stop having nightmares about losing control.


	40. Chapter 40

**3 January**

OK, so if I'm going to speed-run this, if I'm going to need a plan. What will it take to really dump just tons of XP into this?

I need a training program, obviously. I need to break down "control my power" into concrete, measurable steps.

There's no point in starting from scratch, re-inventing the wheel, if I don't have to. There's not a lot of published research on mutant biology and management of superpowers, but everything that exists, I bet these people have got access to. I should email Dr. McCoy and ask where to look. And ask the librarian? Or Ms. Munroe? I don't know. Maybe Mr. Summers. I'll have to think about it.

What else?

OK, here's the thing. The actual thing that matters here. 

I don't need more opportunities to practice. I've got tons of those. I've got a training regimen, and a coach, and a weekly schedule of dedicated practice time. I've got more opportunities to work on this skill than I want. 

And  _ that’s  _ the thing. I don't need more opportunities. I need the ability to take more opportunities than I currently can. Right now I can't make the most of weekly training because I'm too scared and overwhelmed every time I try. I get (maybe) 15 useful minutes out of every week's training, and 30 minutes of trying not to have a panic attack. I can barely do my PT without breaking down. 

What's holding me back is not my opportunity to practice. It's my ability to practice. I need to shorten my recovery time between trainings. I need to figure out how to get de-triggered after I use my powers. If I can shorten recovery time from 2-3 days to .... I don't know? Let's say 1 day? If I could do one day of training and one day of recovery, I could do this  _ much  _ faster. 

So then that's my current project. Design a set of routines to use, post-training, to mitigate the panic attacks and get me ready to train the day after. I need my in-between days to be  _ aggressive  _ recovery days. 

So then. What helps?

I'm useless on my training days; all I can plan on doing is the training. So my off days have to be the days I get everything else done. So I need to look at homework each week, and make sure I've got Thursday's homework done on Tuesday. That means planning out time to do chores like laundry and vacuuming, too. 

What helps? The meditation really does. So let's say... I mean, we're going aggressive, here. Aggressive self-care. So let's say an hour of meditation. 

Ice? I mean, certainly if I need it. But I don't know that I will. It comes and goes. I guess what I want is some kind of system for checking whether I need it. I'm not good at noticing when it hurts. So let's say a journal entry. Ms. Keo's on me to do a somatic log anyway -- use it to figure out if I need stretching or ice or what. Probably do that before the meditation, so that I can not be hurting through the meditation. 

So somatic log, meditation, journal, and then homework/chores. 

Try it? See what happens? It's at least a decent initial estimate from which to iterate.


	41. Chapter 41

**4 January**

So... first day on this system, and already I've hit an exception that needs to be handled. 

This is supposed to be a rest/recovery day. Not doing any training, so that I don't have any further triggers, and can de-escalate my system. Which is a great plan, as long as using my power is the only thing that can trigger me. And it is the primary thing. But it's not the only. 

So what do I do if I'm triggered on my day off?

Well.... I mean the goal is recovery. No matter how many times I get triggered, the plan has to be the same, right? Try to de-escalate. So Ms. Grey asked about my homework in the exact phrase my mom used to, and my brain decided to freak out as a result. That's not a downside if my goal is to practice recovering after a trigger. 

The plan today remains the same. The thing that might change is what to do tomorrow, depending on whether or not I've recovered enough to have another training day. And honestly that might not be a change, really. The  _ goal  _ is to get to where I can do training every other day, but there's no reason to believe I'm there yet. The current plan has to be aggressive recovery every day until I'm able to do training again, then a training day, then aggressive recovery until I'm up to training. So really this doesn't change anything at all. 


	42. Chapter 42

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any of the content warning tags are a concern to you, this is the chapter to skip

**January 9th**

Charles sat watching as his newest student struggled to control her powers. The groundskeeper reported that she'd gotten quite good at clearing snow. They'd experimented to determine how much heat she could generate at a time, and Keahi had done calculations to translate that limit into killowatt-hours or somesuch.

In the danger room, though, Scott saw little of that improvement. He'd asked Charles to sit in and see what insights he could provide.

Charles had worried about Keahi since her first night in the mansion. She reminded him achingly of Erik, most especially in her rage, and her failure to understand how much of the rage she felt was actually directed at herself.  _ This is not going to be pleasant. _ Well, worthwhile things often weren't.  _ It won't be fun for her; why should it be fun for you? _ He rolled forward from the door.

"That's enough for the day, Scott,"

Charles watched as she froze, then turned to him. It would have seemed calm if he couldn't hear her panic.  ** _Shit shit shit please don't kick me out please I'll be good I'm sorry._ ** He forced himself not to wince visibly, and put up a mental shield that reduced the volume. "Keahi. Would you do me the honor of accompanying me around the grounds?"

She glanced to Scott, who nodded, and then turned back to him. "Yeah. Let me grab my bag."

Charles waited while she picked up her bookbag, fussing for a moment with the zippers. He could almost feel her bracing herself for whatever was coming. By the time she turned back to him, her face was utterly impassive. More interestingly, from Charles' perspective, her thoughts were dead silent, as if she feared even to think the wrong thing. In a school run by a telepath, he had to admit, it was a reasonable fear. But Jean reported her as no more than indifferently good at meditation. So how had she acquired the skill to control her mental voice?

He tried to offer reassurance as they rode the elevator to the main floor and rolled out to the back lawn. Even through a mental shield he could hear her scorn.  ** _Yeah yeah, you're so impressed with me. I'm astonishingly non-sociopathic, for such a fuck-up. Go me._ ** He laughed, and stopped his chair. "Very well. I'll get right to the point. I'm here to tell you a story. About the effects of emotions on mutant powers, and a boy I once knew." He started down the path again, and was silent for a while. Finally he took a deep breath.

"Once upon a time there was a young mutant named Erik. He grew up in a very bad time and place; he was Jewish, in Germany, in the 1930s."

Beside him, Keahi stiffened. She knew her mutant history, then, as well as science. Charles nodded. 

"Erik survived, and learned to control his powers. But, as you can well imagine, he learned to do so under only the most strenuous of circumstances, moments of intense fear or anger. He was, in fact, explicitly told that the only way to unlock his power was with rage. So he learned to survive, and to keep himself angry, so that he could never be made vulnerable by being locked away from his power."

Charles stopped before a blockage on the asphalt. It wasn't much, just two small humps of snow, perhaps six inches high, left by a snowplow running perpendicular to the path. But it was quite impassable for a wheelchair. Keahi stopped as well, but Charles had to touch her arm and gesture to the snow before she realized the problem. She stretched out her hand, and the snow melted quickly. Charles rolled ahead, but Keahi stayed behind, and for the first time since they'd come out of doors, Charles heard her thinking.  ** _Feels like, I don't know, 2 or 3 C? And we have another hour of daylight. If I warm up the sidewalk to let's say 25C then it can evaporate before it re-freezes._ ** As he turned to watch, she stretched out her hand again, and held it there for a few seconds. Then she hurried to catch up.

Charles didn't move. Despite her best efforts, her thoughts were coming through now, on a small quiet loop:  ** _don't don't don't don't please don't please don't don't don't_ **

_ Keahi _ he made his mental voice as gentle as possible. She looked up. He tried to match her clinical tone, the shield she used to protect herself from emotions.  _ You have been studying PTSD. Examine your physiological state. _

She froze. **_I.. I..?_** Her breath shuddered. **_I can't breathe_**_._ Her hand went to her throat. **_Pulse elevated. Probably 90bpm._** She held out her hands and looked down. _M_**_y hands aren't shaking. They never do, but they feel so unsteady._** She took another short breath. **_OK. So triggered. What do we do? Grounding exercises. Ms. Keo gave you grounding exercises. Breathe in 4 beats, hold 4 beats, out 8 beats. C'mon. Deep breath in. Four beats._** Her breath shuddered in, then escaped almost in a sob. **_I can't. Come on. Get your shit together! You only need to get enough control to let Professor X finish his point. Get it together, girl, and let the man talk!_**

_ I'm in no hurry. Take your time. _ And he turned away, looking out down the lawn, to give her a semblance of privacy.

It really was a spectacular view. Whatever faults his ancestors had had, they did have exquisite taste. Behind him, Keahi slowly managed to take longer and longer breaths, and began a grounding exercise Scott had given her. When her thoughts once again returned to silence, he turned his chair back to her. He gave her a nod and turned back towards the house. She followed silently.

"I don't know the details of your life," he said out loud,  _ and I'm not going to pry them out of you without your permission, _ he added mentally, "but it is clear that, prior to coming here, you had never used your powers except in situations where you were indescribably afraid."

He'd expected her to tense, or pause, but instead she stopped completely. He turned back to her, and found her frozen, one foot still slightly off the ground, her eyes frantically tracing the air, looking for threats he couldn't see.

_Oh, Keahi, I'm so sorry._ He dropped his mental shield and probed at a deeper level, beyond words, entering the vision she seemed trapped in. She was sitting on a bed, in what looked like a teenager's bedroom, looking down at a paper, a math exam, with a large F at the top.  ** _I'm so sorry. I was so tired. I couldn't sleep that night. I couldn't remember which formulae were sums of averages and which were average of sums. I don't -- Mom's gonna kill me. The last time I failed she swore_ ** _ \-- _ In her hand, the paper began to scorch. Behind her, the paint on the drywall began to curl, and smoke rose from the bedcover beneath her left hand. Memory-Keahi jerked upright, and looked around frantically. She shoved a few books into a backpack, paused to dig a leatherbound journal out from under the mattress, and left without even a change of clothes.

...

The scene changed, and Charles struggled to orient himself. She was in a car, the trees lining the sides of the road covered in snow, the sky dark. To her left, a hand opened the center console. "Help yourself to a granola bar if you want." She glanced at the driver, then stared out the window again.  ** _Hitchiking is dangerous enough without accepting food from strangers. But I'm so cold._ ** She reached over and opened the packaging, and took a bite. Then she stiffened, and glanced down. The driver's hand was on her left knee. She looked to the speedometer, visible at an angle through the steering wheel.  ** _70 mph. I can't jump from the car at this speed._ ** His hand slid up her thigh.  ** _I can't melt the tires; the sudden stop'll be lethal. Can't take out the brakes, I need him to slow down._ ** Her breath quickened as his hand slid further up.  ** _C'mon, there’s gotta be something. Suck squeeze bang blow. Spark plugs. I can melt the spark plugs. It'll flood the engine, but we'll just roll to a stop._ **

The first indication was a sputtering from the engine compartment. The driver put both hands on the wheel, and frowned. "Got plenty of gas --" he started, and was interrupted by a metallic thud, and the engine stopped completely. The driver slammed on the brakes; Keahi watched the speedometer. 50. 40. She unbuckled her seatbelt. 30. She unlocked the door. When the speedometer hit 20, she wrenched the door open and flung herself into the ditch by the roadway. She rolled a few times, lay there a moment, then scrambled upright and ran for the treeline. She shoved her pack through a wire fence, and ran until the car was nearly out of sight, then turned back. The driver was out of the car, looking back at a line of metallic liquid dribbled along the road as far as he could see. Then he was knocked flat as the car exploded.

** _The fuel line. Shit. What the hell did you think was going to happen if you throw that much energy into an engine? All that metal and you think you're just gonna heat up one thing? Fuck._ ** She fumbled a cell phone out of her pocket and dialed 911.

"What is your emergency?" 

"Car fire," she choked out. "Interstate 80. Eastbound. Um. Mile..." She stepped out closer to the road, looked up the highway. "Mile 17. 17.8" 

"Are you injured?" 

She hung up.

** _I should find some shelter. Get moving. I could freeze to death here._ ** But she kept watching, from the trees, until the ambulance arrived. 

"That's a nasty one. What do you think happened?" 

"Looks like his whole damn engine melted." The second EMT stood up. "He's breathing. Get the stretcher."

** _He's breathing. I probably didn't kill him. I probably didn't kill him. Maybe. Probably._ **

Charles ventured a gentle mental touch.  _ You survived. You're safe now. _

** _I am. But what about him?_ **

_ You had a right to defend yourself. _

** _I didn't want to hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anyone. That's what caused all the problems in the city, too._ **

_ In the city? _

She blinked, her eyes starting to focus again, but tears began to show. 

** _I knew there was a substantial homeless population in NYC. Living on the fringes of survivability, I knew they'd form into tribes, as humans do under stress. I had hoped that I could be useful enough to some group or another that I could earn protection. But no one wanted me except as a weapon, and I didn't want to kill anyone. And then one of them tried to force the issue --_ **

Abruptly he was back in another vision, standing in a concrete tunnel. A man had hold of Memory-Keahi's arm; three others stood behind him, one pointing a gun at her. **_I can't melt bullets before they get to me. I don't want to hurt anyone._** She looked up, desperately, and her eyes fixed on a seam in the concrete.**_Concrete loses 80% of its compressive strength above 800C._** She flung up her arms as if in surrender, her palms pointing towards the roof above the trio's head. Cracks began to appear, spread, and then all he could see was dust.

_ You survived. You're safe now. _

She drew another breath and blinked back to reality.  ** _I never meant to kill anyone._ **

_ There were no fatalities at the site of the cave-in. _

The tears finally spilled over.  ** _But they didn't release the names of the injured. I don't know if anyone would have bothered to dig out three or four homeless men, who'd been living off the record for decades._ **

_ It's not your fault. _

She shook her head, and he remembered that what she needed now was clinical detachment. He turned away and began to move towards the house again.

"Now every time you use your powers, you are frightened. You think that it is because there is danger -- that is, after all, the point of fear. You know that the training facility holds no danger, that Scott is no threat to you, and so you conclude that the danger must be within yourself. You think that you are out of control, untrustworthy." He paused to navigate around a pothole, and to figure out how to phrase the next piece. There was no way around it; he'd have to get at least a little bit personal.

"Keahi, I know you have no taste for praise, but honesty compels me to inform you that I do not consider you a danger."

**_After that? What kind of ivory-tower idealistic bullshit --_** He held up a hand.

"No, do not tell me I have no experience with dangerous mutants. I was born with an unsevered spinal cord; I walked until I was thirty. I know  _ exactly  _ how dangerous an emotionally unstable mutant can be." That gave her pause; for the first time since the Danger Room, she made eye contact. "And I know how to identify one. I have seen your pages of calculations. Hank told me of your questions. Jean told me how carefully you considered consequences before you rescued a single avalanche victim. Even in your memories, you cannot name a single time you tried to hurt someone.

"You are frightened, every time you use your powers, because your body has learned that you use them only in times of extreme danger. Your pattern-seeking mind has learned to associate use of your powers with fear, and now causality runs the other direction as well. There is much that can be done to un-couple those events, and we will continue to explore them in your therapy, but for today, all I ask is that you hear me. You are not a threat. Unless you choose to be. You have as much power and potential as any mutant I have trained, yes, but you also have more willpower than anyone I have ever met. Your future will be precisely what you choose it to be, no more and no less."


	43. Chapter 43

**10 January**

I actually got a chance to run the speedrun concept past Ms. Keo today. Prof. X asked me if he could tell her what he'd overheard, and I said yes because, well...

I mean, I'm gonna have to talk about it sometime, right?? That's the thing about PTSD -- you want to avoid it, and never have to face that shit ever again, but it's that desire to avoid it that keeps you having to face it all the time. The only way to get out of it is to, somehow, eventually, find a way to face it squarely. And that means at some point, eventually, talking about those things.

I think I can talk about them. But I don't think I'm up to  _ telling _ them. If I have to wait on that, until I'm up to actually relating the events to someone, I'm not sure I'm ever going to get better. Certainly it's going to be a long time. But if someone else knows what happened, I think I could talk  _ about _ the events.

So, anyway,  _ she _ said that I need to work on setting boundaries. Which, like, I guess? It's certainly a skill I don't have, but I wouldn't've set it as a top priority. But she pointed out that all three of those Really Bad Events were because I didn't know how to say no except to blow things up. The only thing I know how to do is to fold completely, make no resistance... or burn it to the ground and walk away. And, like, we can talk about why that is -- mom's whole oh-I-see-you-don't-love-me act every time I asked for  _ anything _ , or whatever -- but ultimately that doesn't matter. I have only two possible responses if someone asks for something I don't want to give, and as long as that's true, there's gonna be a risk that I destroy this whole school when someone takes my seat in the cafeteria. I  _ have  _ to come up with alternatives.

Which, OK, is great, but I literally have  _ no idea _ how to do that. And what the hell am I supposed to do, then? With no roadmap?

So, OK, that's what I said to Ms. Keo. And she started laying out steps, and step one is to find ways to communicate what you want, and I was like, "Yeah, no, I don't know what I want." Because what's the point in allowing yourself to acknowledge what you want? If you allow that into your awareness, there's a chance you're accidentally going to express it, and that gets you punished. Even if you don't  _ say _ anything, there's a chance it'll influence your facial expression or your ability to act like you're happy, which gets you punished just the same. And even if you  _ do  _ manage to keep it all inside, and never express it in any way whatsoever, then what? All you've got is this knowledge of this thing you want and are never ever going to get. So what good is it? Better to just ignore what you want completely. Free up those mental resources for things like watching for warning signs and calculating how far you dare push on things that you actually need.

I ended up fucking crying on the goddamned sofa. But Ms. Keo just pulled a trash can over so I could blow my nose and have a place for the tissues. And when I was done, she was like, "So OK, then step one is to get practice figuring out what you want."

And I was like, "What?"

And she was like, "Well you can't express what you want unless you know what you want, right? So that's the first thing you need to do."

And then I asked how to do that, and kind of floated my idea of working on it every day. And her point was that this is happening multiple times a day, and I can't do anything between when it happens and when I process it. So actually, I need to do this processing-speedrun thing every single  _ incident _ .


	44. Chapter 44

**23 January**

Dammit, it's been months.  _ Months  _ since I was up at 2 in the morning because my arm is buzzing and my brain won't stop racing. I thought I was getting  _ better  _ dammit. And now here I am right back where I started. I'm sick of this. Dammit. I just want to get better. Is that so terrible? Why is "not wanting to go through the same shit again and again" apparently too much to ask?

Whatever. Maybe I never get better, but at least I know how to handle this. PT exercises, and then meditation, stops the buzzing. Start with that.


	45. Chapter 45

**24 January**

I'm so scared. I'm  _ so  _ scared.

And I  _ know  _ it doesn't make any sense. I  _ know  _ that it's just my stupid body reacting to my stupid past. But I'm so scared. It's so hard to breathe, to eat, to read, to focus on anything, when my body is freaking out like this.

And when my body's in this much physiological arousal, my brain is looking for reasons why. What's going on? What's causing it?

And I know that it's a useful evolutionary reaction. That the body reacts quickly, alerts you to threats instantly, and then the brain can bring in rational thought and analysis to figure out what the threat is and how to respond to it. It's supposed to be a good system. Hell, it even is a good system, if everything goes right.

"_The difference between something that cannot possibly go wrong, and something that might go wrong, is that when the thing that cannot possibly go wrong, goes wrong, it's generally impossible to get in there to fix it._" And that's where I am right now. I get that it's a good system most of the time. But it's not a good system  _ for me, right now. _ Because I'm just stuck in this endless loop

**Me**: It's fine. No one was hurt. You can chill.  
**Brain**: But what if someone was?  
**Me**: But they weren't  
**Brain**: But how do you  _ know _ ? Maybe they were hurt in some way you don't  _ know about _ . Have you considered  _ every possible  _ way that your power could injure someone in a way that would cause time-delayed damage?

And then I have to either try to convince myself that I've thought through every. single. possible. scenario. Which I can't, because there are too many variables and it's impossible to prove that you've covered every possible combination of them. Or I have to just continually refuse to play this game. Which is great because my brain respects that statement for about 5 seconds, and then it's like,  


"OK, but what the signals we're getting from the body  _ definitely  _ indicate that something is wrong. Have you considered the possibility that you screwed up in the Danger Room and hurt somebody?"

And I can't stop it. I can't fix it. And I fucking hate it. I hate that I have to live through this. You can talk all you want about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Psychological Flexibility, and look, I even believe that those will help, long term. But right here, right now, what's actually happening is that I am engaged in an eternal game of whack-a-mole, rigged so that I can't win and I can't even break even, where the penalty for losing is that you get worse at the game, that I  _ never signed up for. _

PTSD treatment is supposed to be about recognizing that I'm not helpless anymore, that I have tools and options that I didn't have back then. But how can I avoid feeling helpless when I can be ambushed by this shit, any time of the day or night? I'm being bullied by my own brain, and there's nothing I can do to make it stop. 

OK, you know what? Fuck you, brain. I am smarter than you. I am more creative than you. I will find my way around this, dammit. 

Physiological arousal? Fine. I'll give you a reason to be aroused. We're shoveling the walk, bitch. By hand. For thirty minutes. And if that doesn't work, we’ll do it for another half hour. And another. However long it takes you to get it through your punk head that this heart rate elevation is due to exercise, and has nothing whatsofuckingever to do with me fucking up. Because I didn't fuck up. And fuck you for saying that I did.

***

Ms. Oghenekevwe looked at me funny when I showed up at 8pm asking if I could grab a snow shovel and do some extra chores. But she didn't ask for explanations, and she didn't object. Just pointed me in the direction of some uncleared sidewalks.

And you know what? It worked. I mean, not gonna say that it fixed everything. But the game of whack-a-mole was easier and less frustrating while I was working. And while I was being pissed off at my brain, I didn't have the time or attention to be afraid of it. So.... add that to the toolkit, I guess. I should start making a list. Go back through my journal and find everything that has helped, and put it all together at the front of my notebook, so I can pick the most useful one at any given moment.


	46. Chapter 46

**9 February**   
Had a weird experience today in North Salem. They ran the van down for anyone who wanted to go, and Rogue talked me into going along. We were trying to get down the candy aisle, and there was this woman just standing with her cart blocking the entire entrance to the aisle. She looked like she was going to go, but she kept not, and finally I said, "Excuse us," and she moved aside. But as we were halfway down the aisle,  her ?probably husband? came back, and she started complaining about how rude some people were, to ... I don't know? ?Want to actually move around a public space? I guess? And as they came down the aisle, they made a  _ huge  _ show of saying "EXCUSE ME" as they passed us, even though we were standing to the side and there was plenty of room to get past. (And then they had to apologize to another person that was nearby, explaining that they didn't mean  _ him _ .) -eyeroll-

But the weird thing was, it didn't bother me that much? I mean, it bothered me a fair amount; I complained about it to Rogue and Bobby and Betsy for like 3 minutes, and it's still in my mind tonight. But normally that would have shut me down entirely. The woman was at just the right age, and querulous and bitter, and in every other way basically just like my mother. And complaining about something I "did wrong" and "am so disrespectful" and "selfish" and "mean". It couldn't have been better custom-designed to trigger me.

And, like all those emotions definitely happened? I felt sad and small and worthless, and wanted to run away to a corner and cry. And also I felt angry and defensive, and wanted to stand in the store and yell at them, wanted to list off all of the things that their shitty attitude is doing to make them miserable, wanted to make them defend their claim that the person blocking everyone's access is the reasonable one and the person asking politely for access is the mean one, and watch them break down at the utter indefensiblity of it.

But  _ also _ , I thought, "Honestly, this is absurd, and clearly has nothing to do with me. They're having a bad day. Or else they're like this all the time, and they're having a bad life, which is entirely on them. Either way, this would have happened to anyone that happened to come along, and the fact that it was me was total coincidence. There is literally nothing about this that reflects on me or my morality in any way whatsoever."

It was the best demonstration I've ever experienced on how PTSD emotions can be completely separate from your rational thought process. And it's not like it was pleasant -- those same feelings of worthlessness still flashed through me. But without the thoughts feeding them, they couldn't really  _ go  _ anywhere. They ran out of steam and died.

It's like the trigger sets off a chain reaction, and like a 4-stroke engine, it's self-sustaining once it's been kickstarted. But like a 4-stroke engine, it's fragile. Take one step out, and the starter trigger doesn't do anything except make a loud noise and an ugly puff of fuel-rich exhaust. It's icky, and it wastes fuel, but it's more of a nuisance than anything.


	47. Chapter 47

**11 February**

Shit. I've missed all the college application deadlines. I actually think I'm gonna make it through, and graduate on time, and now it's not gonna matter because I've been so busy with PT and homework and journaling and speedrunning recovery that I completely spaced college applications. Fuck me. Fuck my life. And scholarship applications, because I sure as hell can't afford college without a lot of help.

OK. OK. That's alright. This is not the end of the world. Last time I was out on my own, I couldn't get a job because I was underage and didn't have parental permission, and because I couldn't work at McDonald's without risking the deep fryer exploding. But I can probably keep everything under control now, at least for an 8-hour shift. And I'll be 18 by the end of the semester. I still have another three months to practice keeping my power under control also. I'll be able to get a job. I can take care of myself. All this is, really, is an opportunity to take a gap year and save up some money, so that I don't need quite as much financial aid. Maybe I could get two jobs, if my control is strong enough. 


	48. Chapter 48

**12 February**

So I talked to Ms. Keo about college, and she says that students are always welcome to stay over the summer, and that includes recent graduates. So I don't have to leave until August or September. That's another 2 or 3 months I have free room and board, and I can keep practicing in the danger room. Maybe I could get a job even before I move out, and save my entire paycheck from those two months, and make sure that I am in fact safe, before I'm on my own.

And if not... I guess I can always enlist. X-men get better food than the military, anyway.


	49. Chapter 49

**18 February**

Not again, no, please, not again. I was getting  _ better _ . Please, don't make me go through all this. My arm is buzzing and everything hurts and I shouldn't have to do this.

I want to die, please, it's too much. I can't do this anymore. It hurts. Please, make it stop.


	50. Chapter 50

**19 February**

Fucking dissociation. I can't focus. I can't figure out anything. I've got a science project due by the end of this week, and I should be in the final stages, but this one piece isn't working and I'm too fucking stupid to figure out what the problem is.

OK, challenge the thought. I'm not stupid. I have PTSD and that leads, in some cases, to executive dysfunction. Executive dysfunction has no relation to intelligence, and intelligence has no relation to my value as a person.

I don't want to have executive dysfunction, but that's not an option available to me. The fact is that I have executive dysfunction right now, and I have to deal with it. What do we do about that?

I don't have a checklist for executive dysfunction.


	51. Chapter 51

**20 February**   
I asked Ms. Grey for an extension on my science project. She asked why, and I almost turned around and walked out right then and there, but I managed to keep myself together. Managed to explain that I was having executive dysfunction, and she could talk to Ms. Keo if she needed, that I'd be talking to Ms. Keo about it tomorrow, but I wouldn't be able to do anything until then, and then there'd only be one night, but if I could just have until Monday --

And she said of course. So.

I guess I can take the night to try to calm down. Meditate, or something. See if I can get myself back to functional by tomorrow.


	52. Chapter 52

**28 February**

In stats class today, the topic of conditional probabilities came up, and Remy was like, "Keahi actually explains this really well" and Mr. Summers was like, "Oh cool" and handed me the marker?

But, like, I _have_ already done that lecture, so I took the marker and went up to the whiteboard, and went through it basically just repeating what I did on New Year's, using Remy's deck to draw sample poker hands and calculate outs. 

It was actually pretty fun, especially once Jennifer started messing with probabilities, and we started calculating what types of draws her power would have the most impact on.   


It _was_ fun, and Mr. Summers assigned games of blackjack as homework, so now everyone's pleased with me for the week.


	53. Chapter 53

**4 March**

Oh god. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.    


We were in civics class, talking about the civil rights movement of the 60s. And of course that's not a theoretical/historical topic in this school. The parallels to mutants are strong, and instead of being at a safe remove of 30 years ago, the fact is that we're right in the middle of it. And of course we need to be able to defend ourselves if that comes up, but we also need to be critically thinking about what's the best way to enact social change, and when violence is and isn't appropriate. And it... it just.

It was too close to New York. I mean, mutantphobia in the homeless gangs wasn't like them trying to kill me, but they didn't see me as a person. They saw me as a weapon or a tool. And they were willing to kill me, if the alternative was me not obeying them.

Which, honestly, is also surprisingly resonant with my parents, which is just seriously FUCKED. UP.

OK. But I am not in New York City. I am upstate, and the security on the mansion is spectacular, and both Professor X and Ms. Grey will know if anyone comes for us.   


I can control my power now, and I don't have to drop a roof on anyone to get them to listen to me.

I have options. I don't have to go back there. I don't ever have to go back to NYC if I don't want to. And I don't have to make a deal with a gang to protect myself. I can get a normal job, I can rent an apartment. I'm not helpless anymore.

I don't have to be violent. I don't have to hurt anyone. I can use my power to help people. I don't have to be a weapon.


	54. Chapter 54

**5 March**

Going to Ms. Munroe's office, after I ran out of her class without warning, was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I mean, I've obviously been more frightened than that ... but every time I was, I disintegrated some industrial-level mass of concrete and metal, so they're not particularly reassuring precedents. Trying to assert myself without letting go of my power, I wasn't sure I could do at all.

But I did. And she didn't seem angry -- just concerned. Wanted to know if I was OK. Which gave me the courage to tell her that I didn't think I could handle this unit. That it was too similar to what had happened in the city. I kind of assumed that she'd have a pretty good idea of what happened to me, thanks to the Keahi-problems distribution list, but apparently Professor X and Ms. Keo actually took that privacy thing seriously. So all she knew was that I'd been at the cave-in.

So I ended up crying, in her office, explaining that while obviously I support mutant rights, and fighting for mutant rights, I couldn't spend day after day discussing it, thinking about how to stand up for myself when every time I did, someone ended up hurt, that it was only luck that I hadn't killed anyone yet.

And I'm gonna have to work through that, obviously. I just can't do it in class like this. If there's one thing we've definitely determined in the danger room, it's that I can't learn thing effectively while also panicking and trying to fight off my past.

So we talked it over, and she said she'd be willing to accept a research paper in lieu of the work for this unit. We agreed that instead of going to civics for the next two weeks, I'll go to the library. And instead of class discussion and homework, I'll turn in a 10-page paper. She says there were people who made huge contributions to the civil rights movement without ever attending a protest or a sit-in or making any public speeches. My job is to find some of them, and provide an analysis of what tactics exist that are effective and helpful, but don't trigger me.


	55. Chapter 55

**13 March**

Alright, Keahi, we gotta talk. Aggressive self-care is what we agreed to.  _ Aggressive. _

This, what you have been doing, is not aggressive self-care. Passive self-care, perhaps. What you've been doing is goofing off, justifying it by saying "Hey, I'm supposed to be relaxing." You spent two hours yesterday browsing wikiquotes on space exploration for heaven's sake! That's not what we agreed to.

Aggressive self-care is  _ actively _ doing the things you know will help. It's just as much of a commitment as doing class, or physical therapy. It's recognizing that you're worn out and making a decision to do something about it.

So less wikipedia-bingeing, girl, and more meditation. Hop to!


	56. Chapter 56

**25 March**

Today was PT, but before Gil showed up, Mr. Summers took me aside and gave me a new assignment: trying to do all the exercises with my power running all the way down my arms to my palms, but not past. It's actually an incredibly precise requirement, and I wasn't at all sure that I could do it. But Mr. Summers pointed out that if I could raise someone's core temperature to exactly 98.6F without burning any part of them, then I could keep my power in my arms and not the gym equipment. So I tried it.

It's  _ hard _ , but I can do it. And moreover, when I do, it doesn't hurt to do the exercises. So that's my homework for the week: trying to do everything -- PT, calculus, eating, sleeping -- with power out to my fingertips, but not past.


	57. Chapter 57

**3 April**

In the danger room today, I was supposed to be working on keeping the energy focused in a small area. And I can do that, but it's not easy for me to get into? Like I can actually get it focused into a pretty tiny area, but it takes me a minute to make it happen. I don't know why; Bobby can make threads of ice without difficulty, and of course Mr. Summers really only operates in small cross-section. But for me, it's really hard.

And he kept changing the target faster than I could focus, and I couldn't do it, and I ended up crying. Not a lot, but tears just leaking out and I couldn't stop them, which like happens all the time with Ms. Keo, but so far I've managed to keep it out of classes. So that was awful.

But Mr. Summers stopped and asked what was wrong, and I explained that I couldn't focus that fast, and if he could just give me a minute I could do it, and I'd practice doing it faster, but I couldn't do it right now. And he nodded, and apologized, and he slowed down. And by the end of the lesson, I could burn holes the size of a laser pointer dot in the paper targets.


	58. Chapter 58

**10 April**

Shouldn't this be getting easier? I mean, I've been working on it for half a year now. Shouldn't there be some improvement? 

I mean, I guess there is. I'm not paralyzed by fear. And the anxiety only kicked in half an hour before, instead of half a day. That's almost a week of increased productivity, over the course of a year. That's not nothing.   


But still. I committed to this. I agreed to become a superhero. Shouldn't I get some kind of confidence boost out of it? Am I going to have to be afraid, every time? Forever?

I don't like it.

OK. Suck it up. Center and ground. Power out to your fingertips. You have to do it, so there's no use whining about it.

Let's do this.


	59. Chapter 59

**14 April**

Triggered myself this time, just sitting in class. I was trying to make sure I had enough time to get all my homework done, and then I started being afraid that I couldn't, and then I couldn't breathe.   


I spent a couple minutes trying to get through a grounding exercise, but I couldn't focus on that and listen to the lecture. I finally raised my hand, and asked Ms. Munroe if I could be excused, and of course she asked why, and I couldn't figure out the words, couldn't figure out how to say that it's PTSD without overwhelming the class with how fucked up I am.

I finally clenched my fist, and warmed up the air around it, and fortunately that was enough. She told me to check in with her tonight for homework, and I fled.

That's OK. That's OK. We're trying to give me a chance to practice getting un-triggered. This is just another opportunity to dump XP into this skill. I should make a checklist, so I can do it as efficiently as possible.

  * Acknowledge that I’ve been triggered
  * 3 deep breaths
  * Center and ground
  * Is that enough? Or do I need to excuse myself?
  * Meditate
  * Journal on what happened, how I feel about it, what conclusions my brain jumped to, etc
  * Do something else to raise my heartrate

Which… honestly I did pretty well today. I just need to go down to the gym and run the elliptical for a while or something. 

***

OK. Heart rate’s at 115, and I know I can get my homework done on time if I sit down and plan it out. And I if I can’t, they’ll work with me.  


Honestly, I think the best thing I can do for my panic right now is… to go back to class. I don’t want to have to do make-up studying on top of regular class work, and there’s still 20 minutes left in class. 


	60. Chapter 60

**23 April**

I...

I just finished danger room, and of course came right back to my room to process all the shit that came up during training. I've gotten pretty good at it, and if I go straight to my room and meditate, I can usually get myself calmed down in time for dinner, and that makes the journalling after dinner much easier.

But I... don't think I'm triggered. It was just some basic, boring, how-fast-can-you-destroy-this-target stuff, and it was basically just the same stuff I was doing with Ms. Oghenekevwe, and I know that I can't damage the danger room cuz we've checked that, and we know I can control where I'm sending the energy because we've been practicing focus, and so... there's just nothing there to be afraid of. It's not, like, fun. But it's just like homework. Boring, and you do it, and then it's done.

I don't even know what to do with a Wednesday evening that I'm not in intense recovery. Is this what it feels like to have free time?


	61. Chapter 61

**8 May**

I wrote a letter today and it didn't scorch at all!

Our assignment for the weekend was to write to our congresspeople, which of course is triggery af for me, but honestly that's nothing new; civics class has been since March, and we're just dealing with it. And this is a good opportunity, because really there's nothing I can do with this assignment that's gonna hurt anyone, so it's a good chance to face my fears in a situation that will have a non-negative outcome. The only problem, really, is the actual placement of ink on paper. Prof X dug me out a marble-topped table to use as my desk several weeks ago, and Ms. Munroe has been really understanding of homework pages that were a little black around the edges, but I don't think Representative Lowey is going to be quite as open-minded.

But I made it all the way through, and got the envelope addressed and everything, and dropped it off in the outgoing mail slot. Now all I have is a few stats problems, and I am off for the weekend!


	62. Chapter 62

**May 16th**

"Congratulations, Keahi!" Ororo smiled and shook the young woman's hand.

"I... thanks." Keahi stood in her cap and gown, with tassels to indicate honors, looking more dazed and nervous than proud. But then, that was Keahi's normal look.

"Jean says you're staying here for the summer?"

"If that's OK?"

"Of course! I was wondering if I could meet with you next week to discuss your options for the fall."

Keahi hesitated. Finally she said -- so quietly Ororo had to lean in to hear -- "Could we do it ... tonight? Maybe?" Ororo tilted her head, and Keahi explained, "I'll be too nervous all weekend, worrying about what it'll be like."

"Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't think of that. Would you like to do it now?"

Keahi looked panicked, looked around, and shrugged. From a year’s experience, Ororo interpreted that as  _ Yes I would, but I think it would be an imposition to ask for it. _ She solved the child's dilemma by gesturing to the open doors on the veranda. "Let's head to my office."

Ororo chose the armchairs around the fireplace rather than her desk, hoping to create a more casual atmosphere. "Do you have plans for the fall? Specific ones?"

Keahi was pressed as far back in the armchair as possible, but she managed to look up and make eye contact. "Not... specifically. I figured I'd get a job, see if I can save up enough for a community college."

Ororo nodded. "We've been discussing jobs, actually, among the teachers here. We wondered if you'd like to stay here for another year -- maybe two -- as a math and science teacher."

Keahi stared. As the silence stretched, Ororo wondered if Jean or Charles should have had this conversation instead -- at least they would know what kind of reaction they'd elicited.

"I can't... I'm not a teacher."

Ororo laughed. "None of us are. Mutants needed a school; schools need teachers; therefore we do the job. At least you know the chemistry you're trying to teach. And be honest -- you’ve been the statistics teacher for most of this semester."

Keahi's eyes narrowed. "I can’t stay here, I need to go to college. I … I need a college degree."

Ororo nodded. "Professor Xavier proposes that, in addition to room and board and therapy, your compensation will also cover tuition while you're working here. You can pick a local community college, or any university that has an online program, so that you can teach and study at the same time."

Now Keahi's eyes widened. She sat in silence, then finally began fidgeting. Several times she opened her mouth as if to speak, then pressed back in the chair instead.

"You might as well say it," Ororo said. "It's just going to drive you crazy if you don't. And the whole point of doing this now was to  _ not  _ set off anxiety."

Keahi nodded. It still took her a couple of tries, but she finally managed to say, "Do I have to join the X-Men?"

Ororo sat back, surprised. "No. Of course not."

"Really?"

Ororo stopped herself from making an immediate response, and forced herself to give the question the importance that Keahi obviously assigned to it. "No more than you already have," she said finally.

"What do you mean?"

"You've already been on an X-Men mission," Ororo pointed out. "And saved 18 people's lives, which is better than any of us managed on our first  _ five _ missions, except for Jean. And Charles," she added as an afterthought, "but no one's going to beat Charles' first-mission-lifesaving record." Then after a moment's thought, she added "I hope."

"Why? What did Professor X do?" Keahi asked, her head tilted to one side.

"You'll have to ask  _ him, _ " Ororo said firmly. "The point is, yes, we might ask you to help out in cases where your particular powers can make a difference. But we won't force you to, in any case. And we might offer you resources or equipment in those situations, if they'll help you help us. But you don't have to swear an oath or sign a paper or turn over your firstborn or whatever you're thinking of."

Keahi snorted, then settled back. "I... I'll think about it," she said finally.


End file.
